Downtime is sweet, it breaks the campaign into chunks, making time pass and allowing players to pursue personal goals that might not be interesting to the rest of the players to play out for an entire session but lead to interesting developments and more hooks into the world.

Time becomes a resource as torches burn low, and the increasing risk of dangerous and non lucrative wandering encounters increases. Time in wilderness exploration is also expended to discover interesting locations or reach a distant destination at the expense of rations and the risk of wandering encounters.

Downtime is available to do all sorts of useful and interesting things but is also limited. Using Downtime requires choosing what is important at the risk of random campaign events like natural disasters and the success of opposed faction machinations. Also with enough time, aging could cause a character to need to retire and an heir to be decided upon (I’ve thought about using seasonal downtime turns like Pendragon or Ars Magica uses but I prefer a little more granularity in a year of adventuring.).

I’m a big enjoyer of the Worlds Without Number RPG and using it for my current campaign. It’s not my go to for one shots or convention games due to a bit more mechanical complexity than Knave, Shadowdark, Cairn, or OSE but I’ve found that during an extended campaign WWN really sings for me. I’m running an open table sandbox in a dying earth desert city in the unstable wake of the king’s assassination where the players are effectively fantasy cyberpunks, taking missions for different scheming factions as freelancers.

WWN uses 2d6 rolls for skill checks as in the Traveller RPG, instead of the familiar d20 used for combat and saves in the game. This keeps combat swingy but makes experts very likely to succeed at things they’re good at. I don’t always like skill checks in game but when I do- the sharp curve of a 2d6 system is my favorite. You know what else uses 2d6 rolls? The excellent downtime rules from Downtime in Zyan and Errant!

Here’s the gist of how this system works in an excerpt from Downtime in Zyan:

This is also the same system used for many rolls in the Powered by the Apocalypse rule family of games for extra player familiarity if they’re coming from that background. Here’s how World’s Without Numbers skill system works.

Downtime in Zyan assumes the same -2 to +2 range of ability score modifiers to this roll as Worlds Without Number which makes the conversion even more seamless. This would be a really short blog post but the one factor to consider is the presence of skill points (up to another +4) in WWN increasing the maximum odds of success. I initially considered raising the base level difficulty but decided it was more fun for specialists to have the chance at greater success in their Downtime activities for their investment in the skill than to make even basic successes more unlikely for nonspecialists.

A Worlds Without Numbers Downtime System:

Roll 2d6 + Attribute + Relevant Skill

<7: Failure: There’s a complication and/or it doesn’t work.
7-9: Basic or Mixed Success: It works but there’s probably a complication.
10-11: Expert Success: It works!
12-13: Master Success: It works and an extra good thing!
14+: Legendary Success: It works and some really good stuff

Downtime Types

Inspired by the systems from Downtime in Zyan, Errant, and this blog post. More are possible pending player interest but I thought these were neat to me. The various new talent and martial training options from the Downtime Systems have been omitted as Worlds Without Number provides more mechanical advancement and character customization by default than B/X type games but I could see them fitting in the games too if focused in scope and potency.

Animal Training: Step Tracker
Assassinations: Single Downtime
Building Bonds: Step Tracker
Building an Institution: Step Tracker
Burglary: Single Downtime
Create a Magic Item: Step Tracker
Craft: Single Downtime
Expeditions: Single Downtime
Burglary: Single Downtime
Pit Fighting: Single Downtime
Proclamations: Single Downtime
Investigation: Step Tracker
Revelry: Single Downtime

Here’s some examples:

Investigation

The GM creates a tracker for the number of successes required. Each success reveals a portion of the information.

Number of Steps Needed:

1. Widespread Knowledge
2. Uncommon Knowledge
3. Esoteric Knowledge
4. Forgotten Knowledge

<7 Failure: Stumped, no progress is made on the research tracker this downtime.
7-9: Basic or Mixed Success: The research tracker advanced but the GM may decide the information found is misleading or wrong. They don’t let the PC know if they’ve done this or not
10-11: Expert Success: The research tracker advances
12-13: Master Success: The research tracker advances 2 steps.
14+: Legendary Success: The research tracker advances 3 steps.

Revelry

Drink, debauch, socialize, and be merry!

<7: Failure: Roll on the Revelry Complications Table! Gain a hostile contact.
7-9: Mixed Success: Gain 1 new contact. Roll on the Revelry Complications table.
10-11: Expert Success Gain 1 new contact or 2 new contacts and roll on the Revelry Complications table.
12-13: Master Success: Gain 1 new contact. Roll on the Revelry Boons table
14+: Legendary Success: Gain 1 legendary contact. Roll on the Revelry Boons Table.

Creating a Magic Item

Most Downtime activities are an open spectrum from Failure to Legendary Success . However, some like Magic Item Creation require greater success than Basic as a baseline requirement to achieve the goals. I’m using WWN’s provided rules as a baseline and its system of accepting flaws in a failed item creation roll to still produce the item without the time and cash being wasted is neat and I’ll stick with it.

Multiple Downtimes

Every time a mission based adventure is completed (or abandoned) the party gets Downtime. This Downtime period usually represents about a month before the next adventure in my game. If an adventure or mission takes longer, players get a bonus Downtime activity for every ~3 sessions of adventuring without a Downtime. This doesn’t make much sense from a diegetic standpoint but exists to not penalize the amount of Downtime received and keep it relevant in the game if particular adventures or missions can’t be easily compressed into 1-2 sessions. Further reading on this idea.

 
If your players can’t touch, smell, be murdered by, manipulate, blow up, discover, or loot your history it doesn’t matter.. Since it’s my blog I can have opinions and I think that if setting history isn’t designed or revisited with the background thought, “How can this maybe lead to interesting gameplay for my players?” it’s not very good for RPG’s. 

 Like the lonely fun of world building is awesome but as it exists to serve a sandbox adventure game format it should provide Information to your players that lead to Choices that have Impact. Like if I want to develop an intricate 6 tier caste system for my fallen empire of Different Elves.™ That’s cool but why would the PC’s want to know about it? What choices does the information provide them with? What impact would these choices make? 

Maybe the Different Elves restricted access to parts of their labyrinth cities by these castes and had magical doors that read the caste tattoo on the user’s palm before opening. Now understanding the society and knowing for example, the funerary practices prescribed for each of the castes becomes useful if the party wants to find some honey preserved Different Elf corpses to cut off a hand and open some magic doors. What if the Priest Aristocrat caste were cremated in a pit of eternal flame, making it difficult to open the particularly fancy doors with their caste name inscribed on it? Throw a few possible solutions into your world, knowing the PC’s may come up with something entirely different that works. You could have a tome of palm  designs and the mystic ink needles that can permanently inscribe the arcane tomb secluded in an archive. You could have rumors of a buried maze villa where the resident Priest Aristocrat might still be frozen intact in ice from a cataclysmic icefall. This was like five minutes of spitballing, you can definitely do better spending a bit more time on it. One can have super weird deep history-but tie it into the gameplay itself for the PC’s to experience first hand and internalize which keeps the multiparagraph lore dumps to a minimum.

 (Unless they seek out a sage or some other way they’re explicitly looking for that, some players actually dig hearing the history! Then a strange old rambling guy in the game is doing this long lore dump diagetically, not the booming omniscient voice of the GM some players wanted the dump from or not.)

I’m absolutely not against intricate worldbuilding, it’s great creative fun and provides a sense of an otherworld with its own reality. But I think it should be designed or shaped after the fact to provide information and secrets that lead to cool decisions that have an impact in the characters lives and world.

A hundred spells Phandaal personally had formulated — though rumor said that demons whispered at his ear when he wrought magic. Pontecilla the Pious, then ruler of Grand Motholam, put Phandaal to torment, and after a terrible night, he killed Phandaal and outlawed sorcery throughout the land. The wizards of Grand Motholam fled like beetles under a strong light; the lore was dispersed and forgotten, until now, at this dim time, with the sun dark, wilderness obscuring Ascolais, and the white city Kaiin half in ruins, only a few more than a hundred spells remained to the knowledge of man. Of these, Mazirian had access to seventy-three, and gradually, by stratagem and negotiation, was securing the others.

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth 

Stick with me, I’m getting to the fantasy worldbuilding and dead gods.

In ecology the trophic pyramid is the basic structure of the food chain. Up to 90% of energy can be lost as waste heat instead of converted between steps, organisms higher up the food chain are more inefficient. It could take 1,000 calories of grass absorbing a fraction of the awesome energy of the sun to produce 100 calories of grasshoppers or 10 calories of shrews feeding on grasshoppers or just 1 calorie of tasty, succulent, owlflesh fueled by catching shrews. As is, this is a neat tool for figuring out the population if you want a bit of simulationist ecology to establish the territory of your biggest scary predators in a sandbox region based on available food sources if you dig that style of world building.

But now let’s take the pyramid and flip the bird.

The power from the owl’s mighty corpse flows upwards, diffusing from its original form to feed a larger number of smaller but still great beings that feed yet tinier and more plentiful beings and so on.

I dig this as a metaphor for how magic and ancient powers can be handled in many post apocalyptic/fall fantasy settings. There is no active inflow to the system in this model. Magics originate from a mighty but finite original source (The Precursors, The Divine World Empire, The Ancients, etc.) that loses up to 90% of its power in waste heat (dead archbeings, spilled blood, burned archives, smashed artifacts, annihilated civilizations) as it is transferred to the next age and then reduced again until the current age is but an echo of an echo of the great power of the past. 

This type of worldbuilding method is useful for fantasy setting of old powers buried deep and drawn upon in diminishing fragments by the lesser inheritors searching through the ruins. The concept of a time abyss touched on in Matt Colville’s “Dead Empires” video and Joseph Manola’s OSR Aesthetics of Ruin blog post which elaborates on the idea that “the more wrecked things are, the more open they are to free-form adventure” are both highly recommended pairings with this post.

In order for impressive ruins with cool stuff in them to exist there must exist greater past civilizations. The scattered remnants of House Targaryen at the start of the Game of Thrones series is a shadow of their dominating power in the House of the Dragon prequel which itself is a mere shadow of the wonders of old Valyria. Each age is a shadow of the one before, picking through the bones of its sire.

Some ancient and modern writers saw the arc of real history as grouped into broad ages following a declining trend. Loads of fantasy like Tolkien’s Four Ages or Howard’s Hyborian Age takes inspiration from schemas like this and the influence persists in the heaps of works they’ve influenced.  Every age is diminished from the last. Entropy increases. Things fall apart, the center will not hold. All is an echo of the past stemming from initial greatness, the lesser shards and spawn of which produce their own pale imitations of grander forebears.

It should go without saying that real history is messy and doesn’t follow easy schemas, taxonomies, or universalized trends- but fun post collapse world building doesn’t always require accurate historical analysis’s it’s very common that whatever current era the writer was living in was the most unsettled, degraded, and dangerous time- it’s always the end of days, and the worst time in history to be alive, past greatness fading. That’s a pretty powerful vibe, what if it actually was the case for once instead of eternal cyclical nostalgia?

“Our sires’ age was worse than our grandsires’. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.”
-20 BC, Book III of Odes, Horace

Step 1. Outline your Ages

These ages serve as guide posts for a loose timeline broken into big chunks, things you know are true about your setting and places to slot in your weird magic items, creatures, and ruins. This isn’t  prescriptive but rather paints the broad strokes of your setting.

It can be easy to get lost in the weeds here. Don’t do it. If you catch yourself wanting to detail the complete lineage of five thousand year old noble houses, stop! Make a note- come back to it later if it still inspires.

  Break down your setting’s history into 3 or 4 main ages of creators, and their ruins, and artifacts- this allows you to have a general concept of what’s happened that can be discovered by your players. What we’re trying to do is add anchors that lend congruency to our loose worldbuilding without building an encyclopedic straitjacket of facts about the setting that ossifies it into a dead fixed thing.

The RPG, The Sword, The Crown, And the Unspeakable Power breaks the process of mythmaking origin worldbuilding into a sweet fill in the blank format that’s worth stealing for any game to come up with the elevator pitch for what your average commoner knows about the past as popular history and what you tell your players.

This is awesome and we can steal the Mad Libs method of history generation for a less elegant version that fits our quick history by Ages format to link it all together. I actually recommend making the Golden Age stuff unknown to most common folklore to leave a more mysterious time period to discover.

“In the beginning… (Golden Age)
† Until… (Fall of Golden Age)
† This resulted in… (Silver Age)
† Until… (Fall of Silver Age)
† Then (Bronze Age)
† Until… (Fall of Bronze Age)
† And now…” (Iron Age)

Questions About Each of Your Eras

How Long Ago?
What Were They Like? (Culture, motifs/architecture/ruins style, etc.) ?
What types of magic items/creatures were often created during this era? Why?
What influenced them from previous eras?
Specific Notable Figures or Creators of Magic Stuff? (Limit to 1- 5 initially, you can always add another hero, traitor, or godking later)
How did their ruin come?

Example Ages of Power

Golden Age/Age of Myth
Examples:, Ascended Immortals, Primordial Beasts of Creation, Angels, City Sized Elder Dragons, Kirbyesque Space Gods, Alien Overlords, Nasty Old Ones
OSE Spell Level Range: 6-???

The most magical time, the origins of your setting that matter, the deepest layers of Just because it’s the most wonderous time, doesn’t mean that it needs to be the most enjoyable time to be alive. Maybe the world was ruled by unknowable Lovecraftian Old Ones, whose slumber led the way to the new age where people could live outside their rule. This could be the dawn of time itself or a thousand years ago, it is the point at which the interesting stuff in your campaign first emanates from. You don’t care about anything before this, it doesn’t matter. In most games most creatures or relics from this era are outside of the range of possible player advancement and gameplay unless you want to wind up playing a truly epic level game. Real Infinity Gem, Simiril, Dragon Ball type stuff. I mostly use this age to set the vibes of the setting, themes, and to influence the direction of following eras.

    

Silver Age/Age of Legends
OSE Spell Ballpark Levels: 5-6+?
These beings come directly from the scattered magical essence of the Golden Age. Inheritors, usurpers, spawn, or rebels? Their magic items are the most powerful artifacts, creatures, spells, around, campaign macguffins, mighty dungeon treasures or threats. Of these make at least one absolutely crazy artifact as your power ceiling for the expected campaign somewhere, go nuts with that one. This is your One Ring or God Slaying Blade for your sandbox. Tuck it away in a dangerous dungeon somewhere or give it to an ambitious NPC antagonist. Put it somewhere a level 1 PC is likely to pick it up if you want some great shenanigans early on.

Bronze Age/ Age of Heroes
OSE Ballpark Spell Level: 2-5?
These beings and items are inheritors or creations of the Silver Age Powers. This era is your bread and butter, recent enough that it’s vaguely familiar history to most people in your settings but old enough that it has enticing magics and was suitably mighty.  If you need a sweet magic mace, wild wonderous device, or helm this will probably have it. I like to have a recent centralized empire, a nice contrast with modern scattered and endangered successor states and settlements for that swords and sorcery vibe.

Iron Age/ Age of Today
OSE Ballpark Spell Level:1-2
Inspirations: Conan/Dying Earth/Dark Souls/Lord of The Rings
This is the fallen realm of today, squatting in the layered shadows of the past.. This where your strange minor items, common supernatural beasts, and new creations of modern mages, witchlords, and alchemists fall under. The realm of the impressive but knowable. In a limited magic setting even these lesser sorceries might be wonders or terrors. In a wide magic but low power setting these types of items and charms might be widely available or replicable. All of these minor magical items from Goblin Punch fit well.

Step 2: Create Magic Items for Each Age

Reserve the most powerful or impactful items for being created or originating from the oldest eras with a little overlap between the mightiest craft of a new era and the weakest of the old. Older stuff is generally rarer and more powerful. New stuff is less potent but more  Try to tie almost every interesting magic item to an Age. Give it a style, trademark special effect, material, associate it with one of the historical powers to create a denser web of hooks. This helps players learn more about the world’s connections and history in an interactive manner and be given the context to act on this. They’re also paying more attention than average when you describe treasures. Your players might grow beyond the limits of the current Age and create more mighty items of their own- sweet.!

The trophic pyramid might use a 1:10 scale between new and old tiers but you could use 1:4 or 1:6 or whatever fits your idea of how prevalent magic items from each following era should be. You might also need more or less magic items depending on the scope of your games setting. The specific ratio doesn’t matter just the basic principle.

 Example Magic Item Spread:
 
0-1 magic items? = The Golden Age
10 magic items = The Silver Age
40 magic items = The Bronze Age
160 magic items = The Iron Age 

Now at this point you might say “Joel, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to spend the time to come up with 210 magic items for prep – that’s a recipe for burnout.” No worries, that’s cool! You don’t have to, no should you write down a couple hundred magic items before you start your campaign. If you can’t even come up with ten big Silver Age magic items at first, steal and adapt from other sources or just come back and add to the list when you’re inspired or need to invent a magic item on the spot. It’s an aspirational list, but I think it’s neat that there’s also a limit to the number of items of each potency and era existing in your game. It’s a finite resource.

Name:
Appearance:
What Does It Do:
Origin (Who created it and the era, 1-3 sentences ) :   

Thrown Together Example:

Name: The Eye of the Flamemother
Appearance: Bloodshot Quartz Eye with boxy geometric engraving, smoking pupil enterally darting around. Shines bright orange When Used.
What does it do: Replaces an eye, ignites everything stared at for 2d6 damage – covered with a ruby eye patch. The user can look into any flame and see what has passed before it in the past. Visions push the user to greater pyromania and must Save to not ignite large flammable structures in view. 
Origin: Plucked from the Fettered One’s face during the Silver Age of Legends by the Eld Lord Hanuba who wore it on the battlefield. After he was felled during the Year Without Summer, The Eye was passed down the generations by the Slayers House of Jareen. (I don’t actually know what all these lore references are yet besides the broad strokes of which culture/faction/force was the power of each age, you can flesh out nuggets in random details if needed )

Step 3: Scatter Magic Items Around Campaign Setting

At this point you should have the start of a list of sweet magic items of varying eras and puissances. Start putting them in dungeons and the hands of powerful NPC’s. Anytime you need to place a magic item and don’t already have something specific in mind, grab it from your list.

In creating your adventure sites use whatever your method of sandbox stocking is. I like the Worlds Without Number, An Echo Resounding, and Beyond the Wall region generation procedures supplemented by hand placing others.

Now roll on this d10 table and tie all of your built adventure sites to the.  (Again, odds can be shuffled to taste.)

1d10
1-4: Iron Age(Modern Era) – 40%
5-7: Bronze Age Ruin- 30%
8-9: Silver Age Ruin- 20%
10: Golden Age Ruin 10%

This doesn’t track with the various eras’ magic item ratios but those get looted or destroyed over time and shattered ruins stick around longer. If you roll an older era for an adventure location that’s modern and in use then it’s a repurposed original structure dating back to that era-also helps give this setting a sense of history.

If players notice a recurring patterns from exploring a black marble swamp laboratory showcasing eight headed snake motifs carved with glowing eye gems and holding strange animate bone whips and scissor blades, and built atop a collapsed ziggurat whose interior grave chambers contain the undying skeletons of hydras with a single vial of glowing blood locked in a chest of shimmering blue crystal in it’s deepest vault.

This seems a lot more fun and engaging then telling them the players via a lore dump that the vanished Hydramancers of Thaarn built their laboratory compounds in the swamps to revere the undead remnants of hydras bred long ago by the Gray Emperor who used the blood of captured gods in awful rituals. They’re going to remember actually experiencing that archeology live a lot more. Maybe they don’t ever get the whole picture but because you know it, it’s easier for a sense of verisimilitude and consistency to develop with your world- a feeling that there’s always something new to discover.

Not every site needs every layer of history to be present and tangible. Plenty will just be a recent construction or built upon a site associated with a single previous era.

Leveling Up and Digging Down

So what are adventurers and seekers of lost lore doing? They’re scavengers converting the power of the former Age more efficiently and reducing the waste energy that bleeds away to the past on the magic reverse trophic pyramid.

A dungeon consists of going deeper and deeper through the layered ruins of these past ages. The deeper you go  the weirder things get, the more dangerous, the more magically potent. As adventurers gain levels and power they are digging back into the past. Explicitly and symbolically. Modern Iron Age structures and settlements are everywhere, Bronze Age ruins are fairly plentiful, Silver Age ruins are rare and the location of the couple intact Golden Age sites are lost to all or the deepest held secrets of some order. 

Perhaps in forging great wonders of their own, delving into secrets, they might turn the Wheel once more towards the wonders and glory of elder days?

Later something new and great and terrible could be created- some atom bomb analog capable of putting to shame anything the old order had and laying waste to the new era’s wonders in the process. The future ruins of this brave new world created by that party could be the era’s ruins you have another party crawl through in your next campaign’s shattered future. The cycle continues.

Lethal Company seems to be blowing up on Steam currently and it’s the most dungeoneering fun I’ve ever had and I think it’s very accessible to get into. It’s also the best digital approximation of a session of Mothership RPG I’ve found I really, really, like it and think a lot of my enjoyment comes from what I love about OSR dungeoneering.

In Lethal Company, you’re players on a team of up to 4 interns/subcontractors that has a clunky spaceship on lease from The Company. You land your ship on a series of moons and delve into abandoned industrial structures with your friends over in game voice chat looking for scrap. And these moons and structures are filled with a variety of awful creatures that want you dead. Here’s a couple things I enjoy about the game that can be applied to OSR dungeoneering.

1. Debt

In the game you have 3 days to reach your profit quota from the scrap and items you’re able to recover from your expeditions. Each time you land on a moon is 1 day of your time. In the first days if things get too dangerous or a crew member dies it’s easier to call it early and try to get out alive with a minor haul, but as time gets closer to your terminal deadline the pressure of a fatal default leads to riskier decisions in spite of really not wanting to go back in.  “I don’t care what you saw in there, get back in- we’ve got to make quota!” This corporate horror framing helps answer the horror RPG question of “Why don’t they just leave this awful place?” and pushes players to constantly have to weigh their greed against their fear on each run in an awesome push your luck effect.

 I like this framing even more than the traditional OSR treasure as XP for encouraging adventurous behavior in a survival horror setting. It’s not just how you get better but if you don’t extract the required value in goods, you’re dead or as good as. The pressure of debt on your character is a constant needle to take risks or actions you don’t want to in order to keep your head above water and live to delve another day with an even higher quota to reach. Also relatable to lots of players.

2. Limiting Communication

The best way to play is using the in-game voice chat. Directional audio is excellent so you can hear where your buddy is as they walk around you, voices echo in canyons, and get muffled underwater. If you go out of audible range you need to carry an in game walkie talkie and communicate with a crackling static filter. It’s not uncommon to discover a coworker has died only by not hearing them for a second, turning a corner and seeing their twisted body and still glowing flashlight and having to breathlessly report it to the rest of the team.

A monitor inside the ship offers a radar that can switch cameras to view each player as a blue dot on the map. requires someone to stay back at the ship as overwatch instead of haul scrap if they want to use it and communicate intel about the layout of the facility, green dots representing goodies, and the presence and movement of red dots representing hostile creatures via the walkie.

One of the worst feelings is when you hear a cut short scream over the walkie from ground control person and know you don’t have anyone scanning for dangers around you and you’re going to have to go back there and face whatever killed them to escape the moon

Due to the difference in medium this is hard to pull off in tabletop RPG’s but I think for novelty occasions pulling players into a different Discord channel or room of a building and the GM jumping between them fairly rapidly to reduce deadtime is a fun gimmick to bring out rarely.

Splitting the party and cutting between characters’ viewpoints while the players are at the same table would be the more efficient way of doing this 90% of the time and I’ve used this to good effect in horror games. Foreshadowing dread is spooky and provides some of the joys of knowing dread when you see the thing moving behind a character in a horror film even if it doesn’t provide the actual lack of information. But as both the knowing audience and unknowing participant, tabletop RPG’s are in an interesting space between a horror movie and a horror video game and I think provokes cool feelings and experiences that are distinctive from both.

3. Woeful Underequipment

The Company recommends a rookie starter package that costs more credits then you start with, which sets the tone for the level of employee benefits and support you can expect in the game. This leads to creativity through necessity. Without enough money to get radios for everyone do we have one person stay at the ship? Do we just all run for it without someone watching the radar monitor? Dave died carrying the stop sign we found, but if I pick it up I can club this spider with it. As teams amass more credits they never have enough for everything they might want. Should we buy a teleporter or pay for fuel to get to the moon Titan and it’s more lucrative and dangerous terrain?   This vibes with the high focus on equipment and making the best of the tools you have with the environment in OSR type dungeon play.

4. Go Back For The Body!

The company docks your pay if you leave a body behind. This often leads to fleeing a beast that’s just slaughtered your coworker only to double back sneakily after being reminded of the cost for leaving them there. This has the same effect of the Funerals for the Fallen house rule of gaining the XP of fallen teammates for the equivalent spent on proper funerals and I think it’s fun and leads to stressful and occasionally silly gameplay benefits.

5. Swings between Terror and Hilarity

I haven’t played any other video game that pivots so strongly and frequently between the two poles. It’s a great time hanging out with your friends or nice internet strangers and joking and shooting the breeze that gets interrupted by moments of sheer terror and long stretches of building tension. The games PS1 era graphics also give it a goofy primativeness that also makes it spookier in a retro analog horror way.   

You very, very, rarely can get the feeling of true horror around the table in RPGs. Trying to enforce a single vibe at the table is counter productive. Humor is used to defuse tension and is a natural reaction and also fun. 

On the flipside I also think that a GM trying to be consistantly funny can rapidly turn into pure farce. Every game I’ve played at a con that marketed itself as humorous wasn’t as funny or fun to me as the unexpected laughs in other RPG sessions.

 Silliness is an emergent property of gaming and throwing too much of the GM’s own from the start often overspices the stew. The gameplay in Lethal Company acts as a GM that plays the horrific straight man to player shenanigans through the setting but with a cheeky sprinkle of dark humor that doesn’t take itself over seriously. It’s nice to have both things.
 

6. Easy to Get Into The Game

I’ve played like 12 hours total so far. Multiple times I’ve had a friend or random player join for their first round ever and told them. “You push 1 to dance emote, 2 to point, and we need to go into spooky buildings and grab trash to take it back to the ship and pay off the debt on the monitor or we’re dead in 3 days.” And they were good to go! When you die and get to spectate the rest of the team with the other dead folks in a voice chat, commenting on the livings impending peril and laughing about how you kicked the dust-this downtime is brief because each day is limited to ~10 minutes at which point the ship autopilot takes off at midnight. And the experience of watching mirrors my feelings when I’ve died in Mothership, OSE, or another game I can expect to hop back in lickity split without spending two hours of character creation.

7. Player Skill over Character Skill

There’s no permanent progression between plays, you can buy some better equipment like a shovel, teleporter, boombox, or a romantic table for your ship as you gain credits on each playthrough. Everyone is playing the same noodly armed intern in an oxygen mask. Much like Mothership there’s not really leveling up (though the company gives you XP that leads purely to a fancier job title on your hazard suit) and when your crew inevitably falls short of quota eventually you’re given a High Score. You get better at knowing the behaviors of creatures, natural hazards, and the differences between moons on each subsequent run and can pass this info on to new players.

8. Teamplay

The life of the game is your teammates. Your fates are welded to each other and the team lives in dies on the  mistakes,triumphs, banter, and sacrificial monster distractions to allow the other intern with the loot to get away from each other. 

More than that, the real person on the other end of the is what makes it fun. Because communication is such an important part of the game you spend a lot of time just chatting with the other folks on the team. There’s enough downtime and goofiness in the game that you get to just talk as well instead of constantly aiming for optimized behavior. On a mechanistic level there’s not that much going on in the game loop and it could seem boring. Get scrap, go to other moons, meet quota, get higher quota, get more scrap. What makes it so replayable and entertaining is the specific humanity of the player behind the player character. I’ve had a blast with friends but also complete strangers who I developed a sense of genuine camaraderie with after 2 hours on a team shooting the shit while dancing and pointing at each other, creeping through dark facilities, stealing alien bee hives, and huffing strange inhalants, and hauling each others corpses. The game has a lot of space for emergent gameplay.

The human element of playing with other people towards a shared goal while being able to communicate and goof off with each other is a lot of what I love about RPG’s. While not able to reach the same highs of experience as GMing a table of good friends in person, Lethal Company offers a bit of that joyous experience- which is quite the achievement for a $10 video game.

Bonus: Steal the Premise for Your Fantasy RPG.

You and the other PC’s have been branded for your crimes with a geas sigil -the Holy Order of Tharn believe all members of society deserve a chance to contribute without being constrained to a prison. If you don’t haul out enough gold pieces worth of treasure from these awful holes in the ground in the pockmarked Valley of the Old Ones and deliver it to your debt holders outpost you’ll be burned to a crisp by your searing geas brand in 3 days. Perhaps you can find a way to break the geas by paying it off or rising against your captors but right now you’ve got a quota of 2000 gold pieces and daylight is waning.

*Debtors brand entirely stolen from a suggested framing for a Hot Springs Island campaign

So I’ve been doing a lot of work on RPG projects lately. This is a good thing and beats every other job I’ve had. But I’ve been coming to that classic obvious revelation that when something becomes your work it can change to where it’s not always as fun as the purely hobby game stuff you do- without the intrusive ideas about how to polish this as a module for publication or help pay some rent with it hovering in the back of your mind. So I’m going to try to make more fun unpolished free stuff more frequently for my own kicks and inflict it on anyone who reads the blog.

These two classes are made for GLOG* systems which are relatedish to most OSR adjacent rules. You can also just steal these for as is for monsters or weird magic abilities if the classes don’t work for you. Thanks to Chris Meabe for walking the streets of Granada and bouncing dumb class ideas off the wall with me.

(*The GLOG are assorted DIY house ruled system hacks spread around heaps of blogs and kicked off by Arnold K of Goblin Punch that are loosely based on minimalist D&D type rulesets that constantly steal, mutate, and iterate from each other. The main consistency are hundreds of weird custom classes that follow a 4 level template patterned classes like these and a neat Magic Dice system for spells.
https://oblidisideryptch.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love.html)

Handyman

You lost your hands in an awful accident but a wizard was able to attach some new ones from a recent corpse. They work better than the original. Two isn’t enough- you need more. More. MORE. You’ve learned the secrets of harvesting and attaching hands on arms made of more hands to yourself and animating them.

Starting Equipment: A sewing kit, a dagger, a dozen mismatched gloves, and a set of magically-infused threads.

A: Second Hand, Hand Sandwich
B: Lend A Hand
C: Mage Hand
D: Ambidextrous

Second Hand: If you harvest an intact humanish hand from a biological creature you can sew it onto your flesh and give it new life. You need to collect 5 hands to build and operate one arm made of hands. You can sew on as many handarms as you want and they can hold or do anything a normal hand can. You still can just use one action or special ability a round. If you drop to 0 HP, you lose one handarm at random, the hands scuttling away from you and finding a dark corner to turn to ash in. Each handarm also has a special ability chosen or rolled from the Hand Jobs table.

Hand Jobs:
1. Hand(le) Bar: Hand has a small nozzle in its palm that can produce enough red rum a day to get 12 people outrageously drunk. Highly flammable.
2. Glad Hand: Can pat someone nearby, massage their neck, and squeeze their biceps.  Gives a +1 to all rolls as long as the Handyman is adjacent to them. 
3. Sleight of Hand: This hand can do one type of activity as a skilled thief, but only the hand. 1. Lock Picking 2.Pick Pocket 3.Cup Game 4.Climbing 5.Really, really good shadow puppets. 6. Knife Throwing
4. Man Hand(le): This handarm is swole and can shove any creature it hits smaller than a horse 10 feet if they fail a Save. 
5.Out of Hand: Something you can hold in with the one hand vanishes. It reappears in 1d6x10 minutes.
6. Hand Off: Hand can pop off the handarm and be directed to scuttle around like a crab. Useful for scouting, getting into tight spaces, or attaching a small bomb to it.
Hand Sandwich:
If you eat an intact hand you gain 1 hp. Takes 1 round per hand to consume it. But then you can’t sew it to yourself, bummer. You can spend 10 minutes carefully unstitching one of your handarms for 5 hands to eat if you really need to- you don’t like doing that. 
Lend A Hand:
You can rip the stitches out of a handarm and loan it to someone by sewing it on to them. They have an extra hand arm that can do whatever they want with, keeps any Hand Jobs it has. Lasts for 10 minutes x (Number of Templates) before it falls off. You can sew it back on to you after. Unwilling targets can Save to avoid. 
Mage Hand:
If you harvest the hand of a magic user, the hand retains arcane remnants of a single spell. You can cast this once per day. Instead of choosing a Hand Job for the handarm, you can roll on a table of random spells.
Ambidextrous:
You now get two actions per round as long as you have at least three handarms.

Lamp Host

You saw the light. It called to you, told you to trust it- to find peace in its flickering. And the next thing you know you came to with a small fleshy covered lamp growing out of your shoulder. It would kill you to remove it, it’s part of you now. It’s your friend.

A: Illuminated Path- Lamp parasite is size of flickering candle.  
B: Burning Revelation- Lamp parasite grows to size of handheld lantern.
C: Gaslight-Lamp parasite grows to size of impressive desk lamp.
D: Hive Mind-Lamp parasite grows to full lamppost size 5’ above your shoulder. Unwieldy to get through doors.

Illuminated Path: You are always surrounded by a 30’ halo of flickering lanternlight. You can cover the lantern to hide the light but it harms you 1d4 HP every 10 minutes to do so. The lanternlight allows you to detect magic auras by seeing them sparkle. If you tell a lie- no matter how ridiculous-anyone standing in its pale greenish light must Save or believe it until proven otherwise.

Burning Revelation: You can boost the light of the lamp parasite to a flash of blinding white green radiance (Number of Templates) times a day. All viewing with eyes must Save or be blinded for 1d6 rounds. Those wearing blindfolds or prepared including you get Advantage on the Save.

Gaslight: The lamppost parasite can give its hypnotic swirling glow. Any creatures with eyes with less than 2x (Number of Templates) HD must Save or begin to walk towards the light and stare into its glow. This lasts until they take damage or 10 minutes have passed- after which a small lantern emerges from their back, spreading the parasite infestation.

Hivemind: You (or is it your lamp parasite making you?) can command any lamp hosts you’ve infested with Gaslight as long as it doesn’t suicidally risk their lives and the wellbeing of their lamp parasite. They can save every (Number of Templates) weeks to try to break free of your control. Beware of powerful lamp hosts trying to do the same to you.