For James, and James Alone

By chance, working out sage abilities for the Clowning sage study, the subject came up regarding whether or not a highly skilled clown could ever actually perform a fumble.  Thus, this authority-status sage ability:

Mock Tumble: When the character rolls a fumble in combat or fails a Dexterity check, it may appear to be a true misstep, but in reality, it is anything but. This ability prevents the character from ever suffering the effects of a fumble, ensuring that even their apparent failures remain under their control. Additionally, the character may automatically succeed on three Dexterity checks per day, choosing when to apply these successes at their discretion.

Climbing's a Bitch

For those persons exploring the use of my sage abilities, who may also use encumbrance rules, just recently I've thrown a nasty curve ball into dungeon adventures and hauling treasure.

These are my scrambling rules:

The page explains it, but doesn't say that I'm imposing an arbitrary limit on three sorts of general movement based on the slope of ground involved.  For the present — and this may need adjustment at some point — I'm imposing no penalties on movement over ground that has less than a 30° slope.  There's no rule at all for any kind of slope in the original D&D rules, so I think this is safe.  I'm saying that any slope between 30 to 60° is very moderately hazardous, and that it takes training to move over it easily.  It's not said above, but slopes above 60° fall into the as-yet unwritten rules surrounding mountain climbing.

I've tried a couple of times to write mountain climbing rules, but remember I'm trying to make rules that have a bare minimum of die rolls, so the trouble has been to define the difference between a skilled person climbing a mountain with the reassurance of not falling, and situations where falling is distinctly possible, for anyone, regardless of skill.  I'm not a mountain climber; mountain climbers do not, unfortunately, describe their skill-set like a game metric.  Thus for the present, on that score, I'm stumped.  But I haven't tried it yet with chat, so we'll see sometime.  Not a rush.

Scrambling I've done.  Lots of it.  Not lately, granted, but I've climbed hundreds of yards of scree, roamed the inside of ice caves not under maintenance by a tourist department and maneouvred over bare rock between the 50 and 60° range.  It is very hard for some people and not to be treated lightly, though of course it ought to be doable for player characters, even mages and bards.

It's important to remember that all persons in the game world would be doing it without stippled shoes or crampons, without nylon ropes or straps, without a steel peg hard enough that it can be pounded straight into rock and so on.  This doesn't make scrambling impossible, but certainly it slows down the effort, since hurrying in the kind of boots that existed in the 16th century would have torn them to shreds in less than an hour.  We can't climb a scree slope in stockings, can we?

The speeds on the sage ability page are intended to reflect that.  An unskilled climber in poor shoes takes a 12-second combat round to move five feet up a 30 to 60° slope, because the shoes have to be protected.  Right off, that's a damn slow speed to move if there are a half dozen goblin archers 20 hexes upslope, who can see climbers every time they move out from behind a rock.

A good scrambler, on the other hand, might hurry from rock to rock well enough to get shot at less, while closing faster with the goblins.  Of course, we can't be sure the scrambler's strong enough to take them all on, alone.

That's not the cruel bit, however.  The cruel bit's the encumbrance.

My encumbrance system is highly individual to the character.  It's explained on the wiki (see link above), so I'll make this brief.

Let's say you weigh 231 lbs. and you have a strength of 15.  I've constructed a table on excel that takes these details to determine how much you can carry before losing movement, which is measured in "action points" (AP).   Most humanoids have 5 of these.  Every action your character can perform is measured in how many AP it takes to perform it.

The table shown indicates that your character can carry up to 44 lbs. and experience no loss in AP.  At 45 lbs., and anything up to 89, the adjustment is -1 AP; or, rather, that you have 4 AP.  Look at this short paragraph under "climbing speed" for scrambling:

"This [movement] assumes an encumbrance that allows the character a normal movement rate of 4 AP per round. Should the character's movement be 3 AP per round, this climbing speed is halved. An unskilled character carrying enough equipment to lower their movement to 2 AP per round could not climb slopes of this nature."

Therefore, as a robust, fairly strong character, who's also unskilled in scrambling, you can only climb or descend at even a slow pace as you don't carry more than 89 lbs. on your character — and trust me, after armour, weapons, gear and clothing, that's not so much weight to carry.  If you lower your normal movement rate to -2 AP on the chart above, or "3 AP," carrying a weight up to 134 lbs., you move at half speed.  One hex every two rounds climbing, 2 hexes every three rounds descending.  Carrying even a moderate sack of newly acquired gold coins, it's going to take you a long time to reach the bottom.

There's no way at all that you can hoist some massive chest on your back and head off.

And it's much, much worse for elves and other small characters.  This second table shows the encumbrance penalties for an elf with a 15 strength and a weight of 100 lbs.  The table, understand, works as a ratio of your strength measured against your weight.  An elf can't carry as much as a great big human.  It's one of the benefits there is in my game to being human.  You may not get a +1 to hit with sword and bow, but you can definitely carry extra weapons.

This elf-version of the table is brutal.  Remember that while an elf's armour has less body to cover, the weapons are still the same weight, and so are the coins, the rope, the backpack that holds the same amount and so on.  If you want your elf to be well-equipped when you get to the dungeon, all the way up there on the mountainside, you'd better hire a porter to carry it for you, so you can dress in it when you get there.

And this is what I like.  Players would no doubt carp and moan about the "unfairness" of it all, or how it "kills" gaming and what not, but for me it says that the goblins are pretty smart to choose a cave that's 2200 ft. above the valley floor.  If a party wants to kill those smart goblins, they better be smart too.

This is how tropes get broken in D&D.  It's how we throw a curve ball at the player who's all, "Oh well, climb to the dungeon, same-ol, same-ol."

I haven't thrown this at my own players yet.  I just know they're not going to like it.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

The Wherefore and Whyfore of Sage Abilities

I had a chance today to crunch some numbers on my authentic wiki.  There are something like 1426 pages, of which 325 are spells, 88 are cantrips, 44 are sage fields, 171 are sage studies and 211 are sage abilities.  The remaining balance are largely monsters, details surrounding the player character and rules related to combat.

Checking the "wanted links" — pages that have been proposed but presently exist as dead links on the wiki — I can determine how many of these briefly discuss sage abilities that haven't been written yet.  The total number is 803.  Nor is that all.  There are numerous sage studies for which I haven't yet even proposed sage abilities, so probably the real number is closer to 12 or 13 hundred.

So ...

A couple of questions arise.  What the hell am I doing, obviously.  Does this even have any actual value, as another example.  I've spoken about how I got started on this, but since I haven't addressed that in years, and I've been digging into the wiki all month, now might be a good time.  For those who have never heard of a "sage ability," or those who have never quite understood what this is about, allow me a short recap.

In the mid-00s, I began to feel that characters whose class background involved a great deal of reading and study — spellcasters — ought to have a certain complimentary knowledge of the game world beyond the use of their spells and how to wear a nifty cloak and cap.  The inspiration came from pp. 31-32 of the original DMG, where a list of 69 subjects were listed, from art & music to politics, history, mathematics, mammals, mosses & ferns and medicine.  The rules proposed that if the player characters went to the right "sage," that sage would have a percentage chance of answering questions the players had, based on the sage's "fields."  The heading for this rule metric was "Sage Ability."

The role of sage was only ever intended for non-player characters, as Gygax and crew never imagined that player characters might want to actually KNOW things, or pursue knowledge ... thus there are no rules there for that.  But I always feel that players ought to be able to do, well, anything.  So I created a flimsy, poorly thought out rule system that would let players ask questions of themselves, roll a percentage die, and if the answer was indicated, great.

I was surprised to find that my players really, really liked this.  The metric, garbage that it was, got used all the time, so there was reason to flesh it out and try to make the numbers work better.  Unfortunately, the fundamental element of the metric — that a die roll was needed to learn what you know — always felt detrimental to the whole idea.  After all, it's not like my knowledge of the Punic Wars is random.  I know what I know, and I know what I don't know.

At some point around 2013, I wrote a post or two about this, and the online party I was running at the time wanted to know why only spellcasters got the benefit of this knowledge.  Shouldn't fighters, thieves and rangers know things also?  I fed this argument to my offline players and they, too, were adamant that the sage system, as it was called then, had to be expanded to include all the classes.

Long about then I made the jump from a random percentage across the whole field to a specific knowledge that a player would have about "a thing," whatever that thing might be.  In keeping with the DMG, I decided this knowledge would be called a "sage ability," and that it ought to follow a few basic premises.

First and foremost, this was a thing the character knew — playing and non-player characters alike.  If the character was familiar with "beasts," then it didn't matter what the player knew, and there was no need to roll a die.  The character ought to be able to point at that great big mass of flesh and say, "Oh, I know what that is ... it's a manticore.   Careful of the tail."

Next, because it was an "ability," and not a spell, then the character had to be free to use it as often as they could within a given time frame.  I can talk about geography all day long.  It's not like I'm only allowed to answer 4 geography questions in a 24-hr. period.  Sage abilities had to work the same way.

Finally, if there was a limitation on the ability, it had to do with how much the character could conceivably know at a given level of experience.  Some system had to be created that said, at 1st level the character might know a few things about architecture, but by 10th they would surely know everything about it ... especially when we consider that there was less architecture to know in the 15th century.

It wasn't long after, mid-2014 I think, that I realised it wasn't just what a character could know, it also applied to what a character could do.  It was this that cracked the problem of fighters, bards, monks and thieves.  Because these were more "practical" classes, their knowledge had to be of the practical sort.  What does a fighter know, beyond fighting?  Well, soldiers know how to fire artillery, they know how to dig tunnels, they know how to find food, they know how to lead, they know how to train other fighters and so on.

Problem was, I'd tapped into a host of subject material over which I had very little control.  I mean, once you decide that a character can do something because of their class, or their upbringing, where do you draw the line?  Are we going to argue that a character can fire a ballista, but they can't fix one?  Or that they can fix one, but they can't build one from scratch?  Or, if they can build one from scratch, that they can't build a better one after years of experience?  And so this becomes the issue.  To my mind, if it can be conceived that a character would want to do a thing, than this was an opportunity to build a metric, not based on random chance, for what a player could ultimately do.

Very quickly, I could see how this smashed through dozens of bad rule metrics throughout every edition of D&D.  Spell research?  No problem, its a sage ability, you get it at a certain level, after which it's not about throwing money at the problem and rolling a die, it's about doing a set amount of laboratory time with a guaranteed success.  Why guaranteed?  Well, because the player had earned the right to know how, through gaining levels and sage knowledge points, just as the player earns the right to cast a 5th level spell or attack twice every round.

This concept of earning ability is all-important.  The premise of nearly every role-playing game is to hamstring the player endlessly to keep the game "competitive" in some nonsense fashion based on the DM not being able to invent a more dangerous opponent.  Therefore, every little thing a player might try to do when wanting to improve their position in the world — like invent a new spell, or their own magic item — has to be opposed by a hundred frivolous bullshit hoops that amount to, "play the game as you're told and don't try for more."

Joke's on them, however, as the players weren't satisfied with that in the long run and now DMs have to give them everything they want, earned or not.  Which obviously breaks games ... but that's another post I've written somewhere else.

Another spell, when it's gained according to predictable premises, isn't going to break a game that's built for that expectation one day.  If I know the player's eventually going to get that benefit, then I'll be ready with game narratives where the player's going to need that spell, and enjoy using it, and feel that he or she really is in control of their game world, while my game is just as robust and able to manage the players' excitement and nerves the same as ever.  I'm a step ahead, because I'm expecting it.

And because, as a metric, every other high-level combatant can also do the same thing.

It was in this vein of thinking, between 2015 and 2016, that I realised every ability belonging to every class had to ultimately be folded into the sage ability structure.  Every thief could backstab, but the better backstabbers had the ability.  Every cleric can still turn undead, but those wanting to turn the higher level undead would need the ability.  There are exceptions — the paladin's lay-on hands and natural protection being two of them, plus spell use across the board — but many, many parts of a character's structure is now based on what field and study they chose to commit to.  Not everyone can ride a horse; not everyone knows how to cook; not every mage knows a pipette from a beaker.  Some druids know about animals, some know about plants.  Some thieves can burgle a house, some can't.  Some rangers are really good in a forest; others are really good in a desert.  It depends what matters to you, the player.

This, in fact, became a profound element of the system as it came into being.  As much as telling players what they were for certain able to do, it also established plainly what a character couldn't do.  No training in grooming a horse?  Then you can't do it.  Don't have the sage ability read & write?  Then you can't.  No knowledge points in swimming?  Fall in and you'll drown.  You can't "muddle through."  You can't roll a die and hope for a nat 20.  There are no dice.  Either you can swim, or you can't.  There's nuance, of course.  Even a few swimming points help immensely.  But you can't just put your head down and roll a die.  The system doesn't work that way.

When players know their limitations absolutely, it helps enormously in game play.  Of course players ask questions like, "Does my knowledge in construction tell me what culture built this tower?"  No, it doesn't.  It might tell you how to duplicate the feat, but it won't tell you who built it.  I'm used to these questions as a DM, however, and since I'm building this system, and have done the research for it, I understand the parameters around each bit of it.

But ...

Covering all the possible fields and studies of human knowledge is a gargantuan proposal.  Incomprehensible, really.  Especially when considering that most of its there but won't ever be used, because what player am I going to have that's hyper-interested in pottery glazes (a potential bard study) or the art of forgery (a potential thief study).  Much of the content I'm creating has no definite application for any player, much of the time because the actual study isn't based on combating monsters, inventing magic, identifying treasures or detecting where the bad people are.

Yet, the sage structure isn't just for player characters.  It also defines thousands of potential non-player characters.  The world is, after all, full of glassblowers, assayers, rat catchers, butchers, apothecaries and hundreds of other potential professions, all defined by those 803 sage abilities I haven't written yet, and the other 400 or so I haven't even conceived of yet.  The process, I have to say, is simply amazing.

The abilities themselves are classified in a manner that limits the most powerful examples to the most powerful people.  The way the system is made, 1st levels are able to be an "amateur" in something.  On average, a character becomes an "authority" somewhere between 3rd and 6th level.  "Expert" status comes in the neighbourhood of 7th to 10th, just as the amount of experience a character needs to go up a level really slows down ( based on the old game, which my world is based on).

"Sage," the highest status of knowledge, is most likely to emerge somewhere between 13th and 17th level.  If you want to create your own artifacts, or hyper-powerful magic items, or visit the outer planes with little difficulty, or even time travel, you need to be a sage.

Quickly, here's a base premise on how these stages work:

Amateur.  A dedicated newcomer to the craft, whatever it is; a base structure of knowledge exists, a certain amount of practical experience is given, but for the most part this is a "thinking" level of sage ability.  "That's a manticore," kind of thing, or knowing that yes, this is definitely a piece of gold ore in my hand.

Authority.  Well-rated professional, steadily becoming even better at it.  Has a complete familiarity of the base rational structure of the given study, can point to the right books, knows how the subject works and can speak with "authority" about it.

Expert.  As this is D&D, the boundaries of the subject material are getting pushed at this point, even to where the hint of supernatural gains the merest foothold.  This wine I've learned to brew can heal hit points, or I can make a +1 weapon, or gain a relationship with the animal I'm training that goes somewhat beyond the so-called "possible."  This supernatural, however, isn't powerful, is usually cosmetic in some fashion and is often beneficial to multiple people rather than solely the character.

Sage.  The bridle is off.  Go nuts.  Time travel?  Sure, it's just you need an enormous amount of knowledge to understand how it works.   Turn spontaneously invisible at will?  It's a trick a lot of 16th level thieves learn.  Build a working airship?  Of course.  Gravity is no problem.

Well, that's about it.  Make a sage ability for all human knowledge and capability.  Follow the baseline metrics.  Be sure to provide limits that are built into the game's limitations and not a die roll.

Never, ever finish the project.

 

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

What You Can't Do

*stretch*

I've spent most of this year, since turning out the menu, discussing macro-design of one sort or another.  I wrote a bunch of posts on worldbuilding, then on mapmaking, and then finally on how one would write a book for a new dungeon master.  Long series, all of them.  And now I've forsaken all that so I can spend the rest of this year locked in extreme micro-design, right down to the character's eye-colour and whether or not they can handle a mule.  I have been right here these last four days, moving from assignment to book, book to assignment ... and the truth is, in spite of my experience in beginning and moving through large projects, the scope of this latest regarding the background generator is scary.

See, a large part of the problem is this: the generator I designed back in 2012, that some of you have downloaded and used, was created before my sage abilities were re-imagined and vastly expanded.  Those abilities became part-and-parcel of the new generator, the one that I also worked on this year and can be found on my wiki.  Thus, in 2012, when it turned out your character had been raised by farmers, that's all it really said.  And now, when it turns out your character was raised by farmers, there's a link that takes you to this page.  A page, and rule-set, that can be expanded as needed, whenever new information that could be pertinent to a campaign, or is pertinent to my players in my own campaign, comes to light.

Very different from the necessary formatting of a book that's desirably edition-neutral (though it can't be, really, because 5th fucked up all the ability stats, and because later versions have invented a billion fucking races ... and for other like reasons).  Unless, of course, I actually add the various descriptions of the professions to the background generator, so that when your character turns out to be a farmer, there's actual information about how this is managed in game ... along with about 70-100 other skills and abilities.  And that ... is an enormous headache.

For example, take swimming.  "Swimming" consists of one of the most difficult rule-frames that I've ever had to build.  Most game rules super-simplify the problem into practical non-existence.  Your character can effectively swim in exactly the same way that your character can walk.  Except that when you stop walking, you don't drown.  When swimming, you can't "rest."  You have to keep moving, until you're too exhausted to move, at which point you better be near something you can hold onto.  Exhaustion IS a limitation, especially as speed, distance covered and your actual ability to swim all change the particulars of when "exhaustion" occurs.  Now, to that, add temperature, current and wind, since all these drastically effect how far you can swim or how well, and how quickly you become exhausted.  I've tried to at least acknowledge these things, but ANY system for a game has to be simplified, because the process is ridiculously incalcuble in real life.

And none of what I've said so far measure your swimming ability.  We tend to describe swimming as, "Yes, I can swim" and "I can't swim."  But we all understand that this is short hand for a deep grey scale that measures how many seconds you'll live if you fall out of a boat.  Being able to "swim" increases your likelihood of being saved, or making it to shore, but just because you can swim a hundred yards that doesn't make you a particularly "skilled" swimmer.

Now.  This problem applies to many, many skills beyond swimming.  How long you can run, how useful you can be in helping to sail a ship, your ability to ride a horse, your skill at cooking, and many, many other grey-scale skills ... all of which are usually simplified to a black-and-white, you can/can't do it.  Which we know is bullshit.

Most games try to get around this problem by creating die rolls with pass/fail motifs, which are also bullshit.  At my prime in cooking I could, and did, produce hundreds of perfectly flavoured pan-fried salmon orders, while ALSO making other dishes at the same time, without a chance of failure.  Skills are not a random thing.  You know how to reef a sail or you don't.  You know how to sing and hold an audience, or you don't.  You know how to long jump 22 feet, or you don't.  Pole-vaulters knock down the bar because the height is at the absolute barely-possible heights for human beings to vault over.  Drop that bar by a foot and the skilled vaulter will perform vault after vault, flawlessly.

I get around the problem with "knowledge points," which allows me to finely tune the exact capability of any skilled person, regardless of the skill.  If you have enough knowledge points, you'll make the vault.  If you don't, you'll fail.  The trick is, before you jump, you don't know how many knowledge points the next vault will need, exactly.  Only I know that.  YOU have your past experience in my game to tell you what you've done before.  Have you vaulted over something of that height previously?  Then you'll be fine with this.

BUT ... for the book, which I'm forced to add skill-explanations into in a clumsy book-printed format, it's simply impractical to ALSO explain the whole sage-ability system from top to bottom.  Which wouldn't be compatible with any edition of D&D, anyway.  That puts me in the position of trying to provide decent rules for something like swimming, without venturing into the nightmare of cold water, gale force winds, rip tides and how many swimming points you have.  The result is something that my own players would view as a joke and which is still a hard step beyond the even more laughable versions that I've read in various game editions ... where essentially, players can basically swim forever, so long as they can swim at all.

It's weird territory to be in.  Mordor, the company, is forever adding combat feats to every character, regardless of class or logic, and I'm granting skills in ... making furniture.  Performing marriage.  Reading and writing.  I have a very different viewpoint on what makes a character feel alive than what the popular version has embraced.

Take the last, reading and writing.  When I began playing D&D, and for a couple decades after, I made the same assumption that everyone made from the beginning ... that all player characters of all classes can do everything.  Everyone can read, everyone can ride a horse, everyone can drive a cart, everyone can drink, everyone can cook over a fire, etc.  The only exception, it seems to me, was that we agreed that not everyone could swim, in part because we knew from various documentaries that swimming was actually a rare thing in the middle ages ... and because we had personal memories of learning how to swim from special institutions that did not exist in the 12th century.  Of course, that's also true of reading and writing, but somehow that always got overlooked.  The party enters a dungeon, there's a sign on the outside and everyone can read it, right?  I mean, it's never discussed otherwise.  Ever told a party that there's writing on the wall, but in fact no one in the party can actually read it?  Because, you know, all fighters and thieves ... or even mages for that matter, since while they have to read magic, why does that assume they can also read books?  Ever thought about it?

The truth has much to do with what era the game takes place in.  My game happens in the 17th century, so most educated people, apart from fighter-types, thieves and druids can read.  But there's no logic for why a mage raised as a farmer would know how to ride a horse.  Or why a cleric raised as the daughter of a blacksmith would know how to cook.  My sage ability system allows players to choose skills, but the cleric list includes NO options for gastronomy; nor is there any mage or illusionist classes in horseback riding.  Unless your father, uncle or someone else taught you to ride a horse as a child, YOU CAN'T RIDE ONE.  At all.  And that's something that throws up an obstacle in game play.

Now, if your mage is a little tiny 91 lb. elf, maybe you can ride on the big fighter's heavy charger ... but what if your mage is a 157 lb. human?  And what if the fighter is a 102 lb. elf?  What then?

The most important thing about a skill set isn't what the character with the skill can do, it's what all the characters without that skill set CAN'T do.  You may want to buy a cart and a horse to carry all your loot back from the dungeon, but if you have zero experience as a teamster, you will have to hire someone who can drive a cart.  And that person's continued survival is going to matter as you're making your way through the wilderness out to the dungeon and back to town.  If he or she gets slaughtered while watching the horses and holding the cart, then the party will emerge from the dungeon loaded down with treasure only to get a nasty shock.  "Shit, people, Gerald's dead.  Now what?"

And guess what.  I have hundreds of different skills the party doesn't have.  I can't include all those in the background generator book, but I can include the idea that no, your character doesn't know how to catch rats, rob graves or even execute an enemy competently.  Oh, the enemy's likely to die at the end of your attempts, but if your goal was to make it painless, you're about to be disappointed.  Your character doesn't even know what that means.

It's my deepest desire to force a party to measure up their shortcomings and realise that the solution is to gather together a useful group of trusted NPCs, who in turn need occasional attention and grooming to ensure they can be trusted, while at the same time sending the message to the party that they're not supermen.  In fact, they're often stupid about things that a smart non-levelled, non-hero character can do.

So.

Pardon my absence these last many days.  I am working.  Just not here.

Two Studies

After working straight through, 10-11 hour days, I took up the mantle of addressing the wiki again, which I haven't done since January.  Rewrote nine spells yesterday and then addressed the elaboration of two sage studies that haven't gotten much love since their proposal.  That's how it is with a lot of work I create.  While inventing the idea is necessary, there's often a very long hiatus before I come around to fleshing out that idea.  Especially with things that don't resonate with players.

Here are the two elaborated sage studies, Mammals and Motivation.

Essentially, the first provides the skills on how to become Princess Mononoke, while the second provides how to become Jenghis Khan.  Obviously, the many links must someday be translated into pages and rules, but for now this is enough for the player to make an informed choice and for me to work from the base material and expand it, should the player want to pursue these studies.

There are many other studies that still deserve attention, but I also have scores of other things altogether to do.  There is never an end, but I work with a mindset that everything gets done eventually.  Keeps me going.

Heraldry

Starting with a brief overview of the sage ability system.

The goal is to systematize the game world's knowledge & skillset into a single organized system, not for the sake of simplicity but as a means to ensure continuity and complete inclusiveness.  Each character class is supplied with at least 15-20 "studies," which serve to classify everything that can be done or known.  In toto, this creates a great many sage studies — about 200, many of which exist as notes and ideas and haven't been fully sketched out.

Characters are able to specialize in the sage study of their choice, but by the system's design, will accumulate at an "authority" knowledge in every sage study available to that class eventually.  Being an authority would be equivalent to a fully-capable professional.  Each study permits a number of "abilities."  These are not "feats."  For the most part they are capabilities the character possesses which do not require a die roll.  For example, someone proficient in scouting doesn't roll a die to make a fire or locate nearby water; a potter doesn't need to roll in order to create pottery; an alchemist doesn't roll to identify a mineral.  Sometimes, a roll is made to determine how long something takes or how much can be found.  For example, a mushroom hunter will find mushrooms when searching, if mushrooms grow there; but will need to roll to see how many.  A lockpick will certainly pick a lock, but how long it takes requires a roll.

In some cases, a success roll is needed.  A physician knows how to heal a patient, but this doesn't mean the patient will always live.  A rock-climber is very likely to successfully climb a mountain, but some conditions, like ice, are never certain.  Therefore, each individual ability must be assessed for risk — but most abilities are a matter of the character knowing how something is done, or what something is, and simply knowing.

All knowledge is included in the system.  How is a wand made and filled with power?  That's two sage abilities, one involved with growing the wood and one embuing it with power.  Where do potions come from?  Sage ability.  How is an artifact made?  A collection of very difficult to achieve sage abilities.  How do you travel to another plane of existence, other than using a spell?  Sage ability.  How do you call a demon?  How do you build a coven?  How do you make golems or other sentient creatures from base materials?  How do you obtain contracts as an assassin?  How do you forge goods?  How do you fight better and hit harder?  How do you learn to breathe underwater?  How do you learn to manage a sled-dog team?  How do you build an airship?  How do you visit other planets?  How do you train soldiers to fight in an extremely tight formation?  How do you teach anything, or learn anything?  Sage abilities.

If I think of a thing that can be done, and the sage ability doesn't exist, I figure out which study it belongs in and put it there ... so that eventually a player possessing that study will be able to do that thing.  All told, at present, there are about 2,000 sage abilities that have been proposed for creation and eventual use.  It's no wonder I haven't written pages for all of them.  But I'm in no hurry.  All of these things consist of things the players have never been able to do; they are "extra" bonuses to their character's abilities, and they will wait to get them.

Okay, let's get to the meat of this post.

Some sage studies are ludicrously obscure — at least to the mindset of the traditional player.  Many have fairly oblique applications to the traditional D&D adventure structure.  One such example is the study, Heraldry, Signs & Sigils: 

"Armory is that science of which the rules and laws govern the use, display, meaning and knowledge of the pictured signs and emblems appurtaining to shield, helmet or banner.  Heraldry has a wider meaning, for it comprises everything within the duties of a herald; and whilst Armory undoubtedly is Heraldry, the regulations of ceremonials and matters of pedigree, which are really also within the scope of Heraldry, most decidedly are not Armory." 

— A Complete Guide to Heraldry

I've read several texts now on the subject and I can say with familiarity that the writing is all like this; I've come to believe there's a motive to deliberately obscure making plain statements as the result of a conspiracy bent to ensure that outsiders never really understand how Heraldry works.  Please, feel free to read the linked book and tell me I'm wrong.

The above seems a puzzling addition to the list of character abilities ... but I assure the reader, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of heraldry and heraldic symbolism as it pertains to the fantasy/medieval time period.  Most people, including nobility and most soldiers, were unable to read; society was organized along thousands of parcelled land units that existed semi-independently from overlords, and along the lineages of the families who controlled them.  Every parcel and every family possessed an "icon" that defined who and what they were, what their ancestors had accomplished, what rights and privileges they possessed and to whom they owed their fealty.  Making sense of the host of 25,000 French Knights at Agincourt required extraordinary skill in the realm of semiotic linguistics, compounded by the recognition that every family treated failing to be recognized and respected as a slight that could cause the break-up of an army and systemic hatred that could last for centuries.

A king's life was not made easy by this.

Still, this hardly bears much importance for a traditional group of D&D adventurers.  So why include the sage study at all?

Part of the benefit of the system is that it applies not only to player characters, but to NON-player characters also.  Every skill and bit of knowledge that exists in the game world is possessed by someone, even if it's not the players.  Moreover, the amount of knowledge required to have the particular sage ability gives a solid guideline as to the individual's experience level and social status.  Levels enable the accumulation of knowledge points, which enable the accumulation of sage studies and abilities.  Anyone making potions is a very high-level character, most likely a mage (but not definitely ... there are various ways to crosstrain into the sage studies of other classes).

Therefore, even if a player cares not at all for this study, someone does.  Additionally, since the character will gain knowledge points in the study, even if they don't actively show an interest for it, there's reason to create meaningful benefits to the study for the character to gain ... such as the old Monster Manual's enabling of attack bonuses to several non-human races when within a certain distance of a tribal standard.  This, like every other random bit of flotsam that appears in D&D, neatly fits into the system as well.

I bring up this particular example, however, because it's very hard to invent practical uses for something this esoteric ... though, slowly, things occur and get fit into the whole.  There's no hurry for heraldry for, as I say, it's not likely a player will choose the study over something more immediately applicable and useful.  Here, I'm using it as an example to support the readers' worldbuilding efforts.

Write everything you think down; and try to make it organized, so you can revisit it later on and expand upon it.  In creating your game world, you don't want to forget things.  I began my sage abilities system seven years ago; it is far too big to keep in my consciousness, not to mention far too arcane.  Yet each time I revisit a given page, or reconsider a certain place or proposed bit of design, having a single organized structure to my thinking enables me to be forever building on what I've done before, and not wasting time endlessly reworking the same things without advancement.

That's what it used to be like, when everything I did was on paper and stacked in binders in the 1980s and 90s.  Wiki-design a spectacular advancement in knowledge management — one that I would certainly include with double-entry bookkeeping and subject indexing.

On to other things, then.

Breaking a Game by Making Things

Sage Abilities in my game are constructed to achieve three purposes: (a) to express what players are able to do; (b) to express what players are not able to do; and (c) to define the amount of knowledge which player and non-player characters alike possess about the world.

(a) & (b) are simple enough.  If the character wants to sail a boat, unlike the "feats" of most other games, the sage ability does not provide a percentage the character rolls to make "the attempt."  Instead, in reference to purpose (a), it clearly defines what the player can do without any possibility of failure, with a progressive chance of failure in the face of increasing danger.  With reference to purpose (b), it says if you don't have such-and-such a skill, then you don't know anything about sailing, and you cannot even remotely make an attempt.  The character simply doesn't know how to ride a horse into battle or make a poison.

This expands the division between player characters past their character classes.  Even if the party relies on two fighters, together they rely on Jim's understanding of logistics in order to manage the animals, and on Jack's knowledge of sailing in order to steer the boat.  Jack doesn't know anything, or perhaps very little about logistics; and Jim doesn't know anything about sailing.  It doesn't matter that they're both fighters.  They are not interchangeable, and that is very important.

(c) is a bit trickier to understand.  There are a great number of sage ability groupings, called "studies," that a player might look at and think, "I would never take that for my character."  For example, they would never specialize in pottery-making, instruction or mosses & ferns.  That would be utterly crazy!  So they wonder, why are these things even listed?  Who are they for?

They're not for player characters ... they are for non-player characters.  And while on the surface they may seem silly or useless for power gamers and survivalists, each adds its own peculiar element to the game world.  It doesn't matter that a player never gets interested in natural astronomy or falconry.  These things still exist, outside the player's prejudices -- and individually, they each offer a field of endeavour which the players potentially do not possess, and therefore, if they come up in an adventure or as an obstacle, the players will have to apply themselves to a non-player character to solve that problem for them.

The way the system works, however, there is another consideration.  Although the system does function on choice, in that players choose which studies and fields (which are groups of studies) in which to specialize, what they are choosing is essentially how fast they will gain knowledge in those specialties.  In fact, each character class steadily gains knowledge in ALL fields and studies -- and will generally, by 6th or 7th level, will have gained useful, applicable abilities in all or most of them.  This means that although Jim will never be the sailor that Jack is, he will someday be able to sail a boat.  And Jack will learn enough about logistics to get by and be effective in that area of achievement.  So, while characters do make choices, the pain of losing out on "the choice not made" is mitigated.  All high-levelled characters, in time, become multi-talented.  It is this that I think is the true genius of the sage abilities format.

The drawback is, of course, that the task of transforming all human knowledge into sage abilities is impossibly huge and will never be completed.  But, well, there's give and take with everything.

Now and then, I decide to add a sage ability that I know is going to be an absolute favorite with players.  Puissance is a study that enables fighters to be much more powerful fighters.  Right from the start, it reduces the chance of dropping a weapon into an enemy's hex, it adds bonuses to hit, it enables the use of the shield as a weapon, it increases range with thrown weapons and so on.  As the player progresses, they gain the ability to feint, use two weapons with lesser penalties, and even go berserk at will (eventually).  Naturally, every character that really wants to be a tough, kick-ass fighter will jump for this study, and forego things like riding horses, owning dogs, leading men and so on.

Recently, I decided to shift around mage sage abilities and illusionist sage abilities so that the two lists were not so nearly the same.  This meant adding "black magic", including golems and magic fabrication, into the mage sphere (and you know the latter is going to be like puissance).  And it has meant adding "unreality" into the illusionist sphere -- because, logically, we can imagine "illusion" being an additive to things that aren't exactly the standard cup of tea.

Because the new online player in my Juvenis campaign (and yes, I'm sorry I haven't kept up with editing that, I'll try to get at it), opted for an illusionist, they also opted for the study, "Steam & Gasgear."  Yes, that's right.  Steampunk.

This is very new, very untested work, and no, it isn't remotely done as a page.  And it won't be, since it will take time.  Marcule has let me know that he's fine with that.  There are three keys that I'm incorporating with the study that are an attempt not to break the game, though obviously there could be the power in the content here to do that.  The first is that while the stuff being made is somewhat equivalent to giving out soft-core magic items, the "maintenance" limits the number that can be made and be expected to function on any given day.  The second is that these items are not made for the illusionist alone: they can be shared around the party, so that everyone can enjoy the fun.  Finally, if the illusionist gets beaten up and knocked unconscious, the inability of performing this maintenance will mean that none of the gadgets will work.

It is a sort of "spell" concept, where time has to be spent preparing the items ... and though they function like magic, they are so tenuous in construction that if they're not fiddled with every day, they're useless.  Finally, there's a limit to how many things the illusionist can keep in working order, which goes up as the illusionist gains levels.

The reader should also realize that, while any illusionist is sure to take the study right off, even if they don't, sooner or later, the higher-level illusionist WILL be able to make a gas pistol.

It's a fun concept, and one I must admit I think is very kewl and desirable from my end.  I don't mind incorporating a little steampunk into my game, though I definitely want to call it something else, so that I'm not beholden to anyone's tempestuous ire and indignation because my world does not take place in the 19th century and "steampunk doesn't work like that," etcetera.  I can say, "This isn't steampunk," while fully appreciating that it is, obviously, steampunk.

Sage Ability Scuttlebutt

This page isn't finished yet.  I had a terrific breakthrough on the subject material today, mostly because I was under fire to get something in order before my game party sailed off.  Before I go any further, I want time to think and I definitely want to get Sterling's response to it; Sterling is our local sailing guru, this being his main occupation.  I haven't heard from him for a while, which usually means he's at sea right now.

The complete page, such as it is, can be found here.

The breakthrough was to measure the ability of the character to sail, not upon what they knew of sailing (I myself know zip; I've never actually been aboard a moving sail boat, but like Spiderman I've seen a lot of old movies), but upon the weather.  My approach is to say that sailors of varying skill can handle a boat without any problems up to a specific point where the weather gets worse ... whereupon, rolls have to be made or bad things happen.

I've done my best making a list of "bad things."  A sailor could probably create a list of about 250 things, which would be fantastic (Sterling) if every one of those bad things could be defined as an in-game consequence, and the % chance of that bad thing could be established into a table of sorts.

I know the system here is a terrible oversimplification; but that's not really important.  Everything about D&D is an oversimplification to some degree.  All I really want is for players to feel there's a "game" in choosing whether or not to take sailing skill as their option, whether or not they want to take other skills that will allow them to train other sailors, and whether or not they want to risk three hours of bad weather to get to their goal.  It's not a game if there isn't a chance of risk, and that risk has to be something that players without any understanding of sailing (or any other subject) can still comprehend for themselves and mess with.

The weather being changeable, I think it is more than enough to say, "Okay, you leave port today, it's a beautiful day, you don't know what it is like tomorrow."  This makes it spectacularly valuable to have "predict weather" as a spell, particularly if you know that you are absolutely going to be able to sail a particular kind of climate without fail.  And since I use real world climate data for my game world, IF you know the climate of an area, then you can be really quite certain that the chances of a bad storm in this season and this part of the world is almost unheard of ... just like a real sailor would know.

I really like that as part of the ability's construction.  A lot of players won't go to sea because the chances of getting caught in a storm and sinking are "random" and impossible to manage.  Here, this system says, "If it gets super-stormy, and you are of this skill, and your crew is of this skill, then you'll come through under all but the very worst conditions."  In short, you could sail in anything less than a full-on violent storm or hurricane, and know ahead of time that you can do it.

In addition, the system shifts the survival of said storm from "the condition of the ship" to "the ability of the crew."  This argues that the ship's condition is what it is BECAUSE of the crew, and therefore only the crew needs to be rated.

P.S.,

Where the amount of wind on the wiki page is described, this refers to the "Beaufort" scale.  I haven't added the page for the Beaufort Scale to the new wiki (though you can find it on the Control Weather page), so I'll repost it here.  I have posted it to this blog before (I love this image).

Sage Today: hereditary weapon I

The Hereditary Weapon adopts a privilege of elves, who receive a +1 bonus to hit with sword and bow, the ability supposes that other peoples coming of age in various regions and among various professions would likewise become especially familiar with certain weapons – and that this would consign a similar bonus to those peoples from those backgrounds.

The list describe here is as yet incomplete; with more research and through the needs of gameplay, I would expect the list given to naturally expand over time. For the present, this is sufficient to describe the notion at play. It is not necessary for players to adopt the weapons below; but the +1 bonus to hit with the weapon, for characters possessing the sage ability, still applies whether or not the character is proficient.

Ideally, the character, having both a social and a regional background, would gain the bonus for one weapon from each, a total of two weapons. This is not always the case, as some social backgrounds, such as lawyer or a sinecure, suggests no such weapon. These backgrounds have other benefits. In any case, at least one hereditary weapon should be available to all characters with the ability.

Progenitor Weapons

The following weapons are available to characters according to their progenitors.

• Bow (short): gamekeeper
• Broad sword: gladiator
• Club: hermit, innkeeper, sailor
• Crossbow: artillerist, bounty hunter, marshal, tavern keeper
• Dagger: fence, guildmaster thief, gypsy, killer, mine foreman, rat catcher
• Guisarme: boatman (bill-hook)
• Halberd: mercenary
• Knife: cook, furrier, herbalist, mortician, potter, surgeon, tailor, tanner, trapper, veterinarian, village witch
• Long sword: crusader, landed knight, master-at-arms, steward, weaponsmith
• Quarterstaff: farmer, monk, porter
• Scimitar: all nobles/royalty (rapier), buccaneer (rapier), outrider
• Short axe: butcher (cleaver), graverobber (pick-axe), miner (pick-axe), prospector (pick-axe), tomb robber (pick-axe), witchhunter, woodcutter
• Short hammer: armourer, blacksmith, carpenter, cobbler, cooper, diemaker, furniture maker, labourer, leather worker, mason, metallurgist, puddler, sculptor, shipwright, stonecutter, toolmaker, wagoneer
• Short sword: landlord, squire, toll keeper
• Trident: fisherman
• Whip: husbandman, teamster

None: alchemist, alchemist's apprentice, architect, artist, baker, banker, bookbinder, brewer, chandler, confectioner, curate, draper, engraver, fishmonger, fuller, gambler, glassmaker, glazier, guildmaster, instrument maker, jeweller, juggler, lawyer, lapidary, librarian, medicant, papermaker, political advisor, priest, professor, scribe, sinecure, singer, tobacconist, tutor, usurer, vintner, weaver

Regional Weapons

The following weapons are available to characters depending upon their regions of birth.

• Ankus: Moghul
• Bastard sword: Austria, Dauphine, Milan, Savoy
• Battle axe: Denmark, Norway, Scotland
• Bola: Spanish America
• Bo stick: Ceylon, Guangdong, Korea, Okinawa
• Bow (long): England, Wales (South)
• Bow (short): Arabia
• Broad sword: Alsace, Lorraine, Venice, Walloon
• Club: Dutch colonies (knop), Leinster & Munster (shillelagh), Northumbria (cudgel), Plains Natives, Ulster (cudgel), Zulu (knobkierrie)
• Corseque: Corsica
• Crossbow: Castile & Leon, Genoa, Moroccan
• Dagger: Rhineland
• Dart: Connaught, Macedonia
• Flail: Bohemia, Moravia
• Glaive: Gansu, Hokkaido, Shikoku (naginata), Moskva
• Godentag: Flanders, Goblinish & Orcish lands
• Guisarme: Brandenburg, Hannover, Masuria, Mecklenburg, Tirol, Wurttemburg
• Halberd: Burgundy, Madrid, Switzerland (French), Valencia
• Hand axe: Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Slovakia (shepherd's axe), Sweden (Finnish)
• Javelin: Anglesey, Catalonia, Languedoc, Manchuria, Wales (North)
• Jo stick: Kyushu
• Lance: Normandy, Picardy
• Long sword: Baden, Bavaria, Champaign, Guyenne, Ile de France, Naples, Portugal
• Mace: Kiyev, Madurai, Poland
• Maul: Luxembourg
• Morning star: Hungary, Papal States
• Pike: Switzerland (German)
• Rapier: Aragon, Auvergne, Bourbon, Dauphine, Limousin, Maine, Orleanais, Poitou, Touraine
• Scimitar: Anatolia, Greece, Kokand, Safavid
• Short sword: English & Dutch colonies (cutlass)
• Sling: Canaan, Inca, Sardinia
• Spear: Berber, Mali, Swahili
• Staff sling: Brittany
• Trident: Balearics, Cyprus, Thrace
• Two-handed sword: Egypt (khopesh), Hesse, Piedmont, Saxony
• Warhammer: Croatia

Sage Today: siege weapon-making I

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Siege-weapon making grants material knowledge of devices designed to break or circumvent castle doors and walls, or enable attacking soldiers to scale walls and attack the defenders; and likewise, to enable defenders to prevent sieges. The ability enables the character to direct unskilled persons in the fabrication of these, so that with the necessary materials it is possible to build trebuchets, catapults, mangonels, ballistae, siege towers, battering rams, portable shields, oil smelters and like machines, including ladders and hooks. These may be made to rest upon castle walls or mounted on wheels, pushed by soldiers or dragged by animals; the amateur ability, however, only enables the character to fabricate the most familiar forms of these engines. Innovation is not permitted, nor is the creation of mystical weapons such as the Chinese cannon.

The details for these specific constructions are found in the links above. The ability grants the character with an apprentice's knowledge, but does not grant competence in managing a crew or firing accurately.

The character will have knowledge of what materials need to be collected, whether purchased or with wood and projectiles either cut or quarried from their source. The character can therefore identify certain trees or stone outcroppings.

See Fortification

Sage Today #1: camouflage

Camouflage describes the application of coloration, clothing and carefully chosen materials to make the character either hard to see (crypsis) or by disguising them as something else (mimesis). With the ability, character gains knowledge on how to mix paints, apply dye to clothing, and add materials to their body such as mud, vegetable material, animal skins and even the addition of natural odours to mask the smell of the character's body, in order to better approach or remain unseen at a given distance, as defined by the stealth ability.

Stealth dictates that the character, depending on the amount of illumination, equipment carried, appearance and other factors, will or will not be noticed at a certain distance, measured in combat hexes. The application of camouflage beforehand improves this distance by 2 hexes in favour of the skilled character. This means that if the character rolls and discovers they will be noticed at a distance of 6 hexes, the camouflage ability would enable that same character to remain at 6 hexes indefinitely (until circumstances were changed). Though a small adjustment, it is enough to give the character a meaningful advantage under the right circumstances.

Camouflage does not only apply at night. During the day, the character is equally able to adjust their appearance so as to appear to be unworthy of attention or so similar in appearance to others on the street that they blend in – even among the crowd they are using to conceal their presence. The ability assumes the character has studied the habits and characteristics of numerous types: wealthy, poor, pious, humble, boasting, boisterous, etcetera ... so that once the character has assumed the proper clothing, the character is also able to assume the stance, tone of voice, mannerisms and general demeanour of a person of that type. The character does not cease to look like his or her self; but dressed as a beggar, the character seems a beggar; and dressed as a courtier, lawyer, soldier or prostitute, the character "looks" the part. All of this allows the character to move 2 hexes closer to a would-be target ... and allows the character to escape more easily, for once they have moved past the threshold that their stealth check allows (assuming that at some point they have escaped the direct attention of a pursuer) they can once again blend into a crowd and evade pursuers.

Preparation
The character must purchase dyes and paints, clothing and articles designed to support a desired charade, or spend a plausible amount of time gathering materials, shaping them and applying them to his or her person. This cannot be done hastily, except in matters like the application of black out material to the face at night. The DM must use good judgement, be flexible and accept that the character does have the knowledge necessary to mix various materials together to produce the effect desired.

See Concealment

Sage Today: clinch fighting

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Clinch Fighting replaces aspects of brawling as a grappling attack, in which the character has some experience with using clinch holds. As an amateur-level ability, the character does not gain expertise in any specific hold – yet, when rushing an opponent, the character does receive a +1 bonus to hit. As well, damage done when clinch-fighting equals 1d4, adjusted by the character's strength-damage bonus (2 pts. more than that done by ordinary brawling). As with brawling, if the opponent is stunned, the defender is considered to be held, or pinned, and subject to further damage by the attacker.

Furthermore, when defending against a wrestling attack made by an unskilled grappler, the clinch fighter is granted a 20% bonus to their listed weight. For example, a 210 lb. defender would be counted as 252 lb. This bonus is not granted when fighting skilled opponents (those with amateur-level training or better).

Additionally, if a clinch-fighter is held, then following the round when they are stunned, they are entitled to a saving throw against paralysation. If successful, then the hold is broken and the character is able to move up to one combat hex away from their opponent.

Sage Today: vitality

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Vitality strengthens the character's resistance to disease, fatigue and system shock, through the manipulation of Qi (chi or ki), the vital force within the body; this quasi-energy is used to arouse the body to fight off any infection, greatly increasing the likelihood of the character enduring and surviving any natural ailment, regardless of constitution. This is because energy of Qi derives from outside the character; the normal effects of constitution, with regards to health and survival, is therefore surpassed by the sage ability.

The onset of disease involves a determination of both nature and degree. Nature describes whether a disease is acute or chronic. Degree determines whether the disease is mild, severe or terminal. Both are determined by a d8 roll. Vitality subtracts 1 point from both rolls in this determination for each 10 points of knowledge the character possesses. This greatly decreases the likelihood of most diseases being terminal even at a low experience level; as knowledge accumulates, the character will suffer little from any disease, and will ultimately become immune entirely.

As regards forced ability and fatigue, the character may likewise increase the total amount of time they may continue to act without needing to make a check, beginning with the limit of their natural constitution, by 1 hour per 8 points of knowledge, regardless of the activity performed. Thus, a character possessed of the vitality ability, having a 10 constitution and 35 points of knowledge, would be able to perform hard physical labor for 14 hours without making a forced ability check.

Finally, the character's ability to survive a system shock roll is increased by 1% per 7 points of knowledge; this would mean that a character with an 18 constitution and the vitality ability would never need to make a system shock check, as it would be adjusted to 100%.

None of these benefits is received if the character does not possess sufficient points to be an amateur in the Way of the Blood sage study.

Sage Today: bring comfort

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Bring comfort is a principle of building that proclaims the comfort of the occupant is of greatest importance, and that all conditions of the building's design must adhere to that principle. This argues that the building is like a living thing, and that it brings an innate sustenance, security and feeling of well-being, through its shape, its walls, its windows and stairways. The building, therefore, should be built exclusively for its occupants; no two occupants are alike and therefore no two interiors can be alike, in terms of shape, materials and aesthetics.

The character is imbued with an ability obtain sufficient knowledge through meeting with the would-be occupant to design a residence of redoubtable comfort. Each occupant will have their own room, with common and work spaces, and access to other spaces as specified by the needs of the dwellers who will live there. Once the home is lived in for a month or more, the occupants will gain benefits as follows:

• The home will provide the effects of aid rest, enabling individuals within to heal hit points and injuries as though two levels or hit dice higher than ordinary.

• Ability checks are granted a +2 bonus if the instruction takes place within the home or its environs.

• Reduces the degree of disease by one-half point, lessening the chance that a disease will be either severe or terminal in nature, so long as the sufferer is laid in the home.

• Improves the chance of a successful fertility by 10%, if pregnancy is desired.

• Widens the range of safe temperature from chilly to balmy if a malady check might be required.

• Raises the charisma of all individuals by 1 point when at home.

These are benefits which can be enjoyed only by those persons for whom the home was specifically designed. As can be seen below, guests may be made comfortable by the home, but they would not accrue the benefits merely by dwelling there.

Construction

The total raw materials of the home to be built must equal 1,000 gold pieces (g.p.) per combined levels of all occupants of the dwelling who is to gain these benefits. Persons residing with the home, or its environs, who do not receive these benefits, but be allotted 250 additional g.p. per person, to build spaces that will not infringe upon the home's benefitting occupants. Adding occupants without these spaces will infringe on the intended occupants of the home, so that the benefits described above will not be enjoyed. This may also occur if the character's needs increase.

For example, a home is built for three 3rd level characters, who must each spend 3,000 g.p. towards the price of the home. They then spend an additional 750 g.p., enabling three other persons to live in the home, who will not benefit from it. However, should this number increase by one additional person, or should any of the characters gain even one level, the home will seem overcrowded and unsatisfying, and therefore the benefits for all will be lost. If one person were to move out, however, those remaining could share out the space again in a manner that would benefit the most persons.

It is therefore necessary for the would-be residents to plan for the future, not only in the needs they may one day possess, but also for the number of other persons they may wish to have live with them.

The number of g.p. above does not include the time or cost of property, labour and other insundries needed to build the home.

Sage Today: dosing

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Dosing imbues the character with unusual skill in dosing either drink or food with ingestive poison, so that the victim will consume the poisoned nourishment. The ability presupposes the character has the freedom to move and act in the company of the victim, such as acting within the confines of a tavern, while likewise attending a dinner or feast, at a public fair or other event and so on. So long as the character has some pretext for casually passing the victim close enough to reach out and pour out a vial of poison, the dosing can be done without trouble. Obviously, some consumable must be involved; the character may, if choosing to do so, provide food or drink with the poison already incorporated ... but the ability does not provide any assurance that the victim will trust the character, unless the character has taken the necessary role-playing steps in order to obtain this trust.

The ability also gives the character knowledge of how much dose to give, so that the poison will not be detected until it is too late. In certain cases, particularly with the most dangerous of poisons, the consumable to be poisoned must have a strong, potentially bitter taste. This may only mean waiting until such time as the victim chooses to eat or drink a food of that type, then slipping in to perform the deed.

Although the poison is consumed, the victim is yet entitled to a saving throw; a success indicates that only a small amount was consumed (perhaps due to the victim being distracted during the meal or in being convivial) before the poison was detected. A modifier of -2 to the victim's saving throw is applied by the dosing ability. This small amount will yet be sufficient to cause 20-50% of the poison's total potential damage. If the save is not made, then the victim has consumed enough to suffer the full damage of the poison.

There will be no doubt for those directly observing the poisoning to know the cause; to conceal the poison so that the incident will appear to have been death by natural or undetermined causes, the character must possess the subtle poisoning ability.

See Poisoning

Sage Today: interposing aura

Content created in response to voting on my lottery page.  I have also created the wiki page for the way of the dragon.

Please join in.  Anyone can vote.

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The interposing aura is enabled through training and practiced meditation.  The character is able to wield an unusual magical emanation, in the language of monks called "the dragon." This is more familiar to some as "wild magic." The aura thus created is both magical and invisible; the effect is to cloud the minds of enemy combatants so that they cannot attack — or have not the will to attack — from specific quarters as chosen by the character.

In game terms, this translates as closing off two sides of a combat hex, as shown in the image; the two sides chosen need not be adjacent. To evoke the aura, the character must spend one full round in meditation; this meditation has similarities to spellcasting, except that to break the character's concentration requires damage, and that a successful meditation can be attempted as often as desired. The character can take no other action during this meditation.

Once evoked, the aura will remain, so long as the character does not leave the hex; a stun lock that knocks the character out of the hex would be sufficient. Once in place, neither enemies nor allies will feel able to attack in melee through the aura — that is, hand-to-hand. Missile weapons attacks and magic use is not prevented. Though it is possible for the character to attack through this barrier, doing so will dispel the aura until it can be evoked again.

The aura does not conceal the character's presence or restrain enemies from moving to a place where they feel able to attack. The aura merely conveys a strong conviction that the character is impregnable upon any point where the aura is in place.

Take note that if the prepared character were to stand fast in a narrow corridor, or upon a bridge, they could deny an enemy the will to advance directly; however, an enemy would only choose to attack with missile weapons, no doubt forcing the character to give ground.

The aura will affect creatures, regardless of size or intelligence. The aura will not prevent attacks from above. Another character with the sage ability will be able to ignore the aura.

Sage Today: harvest poisonous herbs

In keeping with the vote I've installed on the lottery page, the asked for content today is completed (and copied below).   I also created and expanded the equipment notes page, adding 24 possible poisonous herbs with links, to that list.  Yesterday, I did some work with "set snares," and the day before that, with "find place."

Please join in.  Anyone can vote.

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Harvest poisonous herbs indicates that the character is competent to effectively gather all sorts of poison herbs, plants, fungus and other vegetable matter from a wilderness environment, with greater alacrity and scrutiny than might an ordinary person. The ability includes the character's awareness of more or less toxic varieties of the same approximate family of plants; even which specific plants are bound to produce more or less toxicity based upon the placement and soil where the plant grows.

Harvesting

This is best done at certain times of the year; flowering plants must be harvested from late spring until the middle of summer; seeds and fruits cannot be harvested until the last weeks of summer; some of these may be harvested even into the winter months. During the dry season of tropical and sub-tropical climates, gathering is reduced to 25% of normal. In temperate climates, gathering will fall by 20% cumulatively per week, following the 1st of August, to a minimum of 10% of normal.

The amount of poisonous herbs that can be gathered per day, during good seasons, equals one to four pounds of good materials — enough to make quite a lot of poison. The nature and species gathered is dictated by the player, so that all of it might be, say, belladonna, or it might be equally divided between belladonna and some other material. The limit in amount is not due to the lack of poisonous matter, but to the time needed to carefully collect and locate what's available.

The ability grants the character the ability to do this safely, using gloves, tools and containers that ensure the character will not self-poison while harvesting. This material is then assumed to be stored safely and managed carefully, so that cross-contamination with other substances and materials can't happen.

Species

It falls upon the DM to determine which specific herbs are available for harvesting in the character's locale. Many poisonous plants will be available throughout a given continent. Many poisonous plants will not exist in certain areas of vegetation — alpine highlands, deserts, steppelands and tundras are notable places where it may be difficult to find the amount of matter specified above, particularly if there is no vegetation at all. Decidious and broadleaf forests, on the other hand, will be a virtual Mecca with regards to exhaustive varieties of poisonous species. Some information about available poison plants may be found under equipment notes.

See Poisoning (sage study)