Bringing Black Swans to The Table

 The reason I have always preferred being a GM over a player is the sheer scope of creative tools at my disposal.  I get to craft a world and everything within it.  When I got back into TTRPGs a few years back I started as a player and I had a blast, however, 5e just didn't enthrall me the way that old AD&D book I bought off a classified ad when I was a teenager.  I was desperate to try something with more bite.  And holy shit I discovered Fire on The Velvet Horizon by the OSR power couple Patrick Stewart and Scrap Princess and then a few months later I am rapidly running out of book space.

The OSR community seems to excel at creativity and that is why I love it.  Weird and wonderful settings are my jam, so I want to help add to that.  This topic may well stretch over a series of posts because it is a fantastically deep concept that I think can be applied to any RPG under the sun.  What we will be looking at is a consideration of Black Swan Events and how we can consider it in your games.

Black Swan Events out of Context

A Black Swan Event is a term coined by Nassim Taleb in his book of the same name (The Black Swan).  To describe simply it is an event that occurs that has a huge impact (physically, politically, economically, etc.), it comes as a surprise to those who observe it, and it is something that is rationalised in hindsight.  It is perhaps better to consider the following examples:

• The Aztecs coming into contact with Europeans
• The Black Death
• 9/11
• The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand

In each of these historical cases, the people of the time did not predict the horror that was about to occur, and when it happened the effect of the event was so huge it changed the course of the world.  I think is the most important aspect of the Black Swan event is the out-of-context nature of what is happening.  The people suffering under its effect have no way of understanding either the scale or nature of the change about to occur because of the out-of-wack nature of the event.

The late and very great author Iain (M) Banks had a similar take on these kinds of events, he referred to them as Outside Context Problems, in essence, a challenge faced by a group to which they have no contextual understanding.  This is how he described it in his book Excession.

"The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."

-Iain M. Banks, Excessions (1996)

A land beset by Black Swans

Hopefully, the concept makes more sense now.  Basically, they are the big surprise occurrences in history upon which the axis of human civilsation shifts.  They carry with them a myriad of complications, changes, and maybe even plot hooks.

In my previous post, I described a series of post-apocalyptic settings, in each case the world been affected by a black swan event.  The corpse of a god colliding with a planet like a meteorite, a terrible plague taking humanity to breathe away from extinction, and a world where unobserved regions of landmass simply disappear leaving nothing but the void of space.

Black Swan events are a magnificent way to throw conflict, weirdness, and real peril into your campaign, and because it is RPGs are only limited to your imagination they can be as weird and as outlandish as you like.  They don't have to be violent (though often the consequences of them lead to violence), they just have to usher in irresistible change.  

Here are a few examples of black swan events for "Generic Fantasy World"

• The Sorcerer King just got murdered by a slave!  Everyone thought that he was immortal, and well if he ain't immortal then his barons and guards are certainly not!
• A  deligation of daemons has appeared at the outskirts of the city.  They want a formal end to hostilities.  It turns out there was a massive revolution in hell and they overthrew the Overfiend and have instituted some kind of democracy!
• The sun has gained sentience and is now demanding daily sacrifices.  Wherever its light goes it sees, and like some mad dictator, it NEEDS to be loved at all times.  Only on the nights when no moon is in the sky do people party.
• Unbeknownst to the world above for the last 50 years, the Morlocks had been hollowing out the earth underneath the greatest cities of the world.  Then on one fateful day in unison, they kicked out all of the supports, and all of these cities, their governments, and royalty fell into sinkholes of awesome size.  The survivors were immediately set upon by the morlock troops who are now intent on enslaving the surface.

Ways to use Black Swan Events

The way I see it there are a few ways to implement black swan events:

1. They are great historical events that add a bit of flavor to your setting's history.  You would only need a few to give a sense of a living breathing world with a sense of dynamic history and change.
2. Throw one into an existing campaign.  It will radically shake up the world and everything within it.
3. They can provide the backdrop for a setting.  The main high concept feature upon which you build your game world around.

Next post I will be attempting the first stage of the implementation of a black swan generator.  I think I am gonna call it the M.E.G.  The Massive Event Generator.  I like the ring of that!

A Fist full of Post Apocolypse

 I freaking love post-apocalyptic settings.  A good high concept setting for a campaign is like good science fiction, it will ask questions about how humans will change when faced with a fundamentally different experience of life.

Also if you have a post-apocalyptic setting you no longer need to come up with any justifications for why there are so many dungeons populating the world.  They exist because they are as much a part of the environment as mountains and forests.

Below I present to you a number of post-apocalyptic settings that have been bouncing around my brain for a while.  Some are readily inspired by other works others just came to me while swiping right while on the loo!

The Godfall

• Countless generations ago God fell to earth.  At least it was assumed to be God (or at least a god).  It hurtled through space and smashed into the planet creating an unbridled extinction event.
• The impact created earthquakes and tsunamis on an unprecedented scale.  The dust from the impact shot into the stratosphere darkening the skies.  Civilization was snuffed out.
• The corpse of God now rests in a vast crater/fault in the planet that runs almost completely from pole to pole.
• The body of God is rotting, the juices of its decay are seeping through the rocks and soil alike.  All things touched by the rot mutate into new forms.  Occasionally these are benign or even beneficial but all too often they are dangerous and horrific.
• Around the crater (the so-called Godfall) are the Faultlands.  An area that saw the worst of the tectonic upheaval.  It is full of faultlines, mountains chains, deep jungles, and volcanoes.
• The Faultlands are heavily under the influence of God's rot, the creatures here are changed and dangerous.
• A stoic few decide to make a pilgrimage to the Godfall so that they may mourn the death of God and view its corpse.

The Overgrown City

• The lost generations of the past had such ambition.  They built THE CITY, the only city, a city that covered every last square meter of the world.  The generations past lived in peace and richness until the Great Dying happened.  This is a mysterious event that is only remembered through oral histories.  The stories speak of a terrible plague from the sky, people dying in the billions and some speak of creatures crawling out of the corpses of the dead and dying.
• The city has lain abandoned for uncountable generations, and like all abandoned cities nature reclaims it.  Atop the ruins of the old world is The Green an endless rainforest that carpets the world.  The world is verdant with life, even the dark streets below the trees.  The life that has evolved in The Green is caught in a hyper-aggressive evolutionally arms race (almost by design it seems).  These creatures are dangerous and often immiscible with human existence.
• Humanity was a micron away from extinction and yet against the odds through the years the survivors clung on.  They have reclaimed a corner of the city, and their numbers grow but The Green around them threatens to always swallow them whole.
• Archonaughts, hunters, and explorers step into The Green to plunder it for past riches or the bounties of the things that dwell in canopy, root, and branch.

The Unobserved World

• This one makes sense if we assumed the world is flat.
• The apocalypse has been a slow burn, but it has also been utterly devastating to the civilizations of the world.  It all began when a mountain in the wilderness just disappeared.  In its place was a vast hole in the world that cut all the way down to the endless void of space.
• This pattern repeated with increasing frequency.  Entire chunks of land would vanish leaving only a hole in reality.  However, there was always one curious common factor.  No one saw what happened.  The land that disappeared was always unseen and uninhabited.
• The results were devastating entire oceans drained away, forests and farmland lost their topsoil and slowly much of the world was eroded down to the bedrock.  As a result, civilization collapsed.
• A few bastions of once-mighty empires hold on.  In this strange pockmarked landscape.  Each guards their agriculture fiercely and bizarre ritual magic seeks to give mages omniscient sight so that no more of the world can vanish unseen.

Build a Golem

 Magic-users are mad bastards right?  But they are bloody good to have on your side, they dominate your enemies, chuck fireballs at giants, and unleash the occasional cloud kill.  Magnificent stuff.  Unfortunately, they ain't much good in a scrap, a few swift kicks to the gonads and that's it, they're done.  Many magic-users have found the best solution to this problem is to get some mug to fight for them.  The most basic form of this is finding some dull-witted fighter-type called Grod, or whatever to act as their smiting machine.  Others summon their own help or bewitch the minds of others to murder their former friends, magic-users are a canny sort.  

There are a few however that feel that even this is not enough and so they lower themselves to pseudo-engineering and make their very own an unstoppable killing machine.  A golem.  These things at heart are a lump of something material int to some a humanoid-like shape that is animated through arcane know-how and follows the master's instructions to the letter.

To build one of these death machines a magic-user will need:

• A place to make their golem
• The Right Tools
• Sufficient amounts of the material required
• Loadsamoney!

Let's do this like a build-a-bear, where we make our golem in a modular fashion.  We are also going to do it so that the magic-user can build a golem at any level, they just need access to the materials and know-how.

Step 1 Determining Hit Dice:

Ultimately choose a method that works for your campaign but here are some suggestions based on how murderous you will allow it to be:

1. Reasonably Murderous:  The maximum hit die of the golem is calculated as half the level of the magic-user.  The hit die maximum is also increased by 1 for each INT modifier.  However, this total may never exceed the level of the magic-user.
2. Pretty Damn Murderous:  The maximum hit die of the golem is calculated as the same level as the magic-user.  The hit die maximum is also increased by 1 for each INT modifier.   However, this total may never exceed twice the level of the magic-user.
3. Unreasonably Murderous:  The maximum hit die of the golem is calculated as twice the level of the magic-user.  The hit die maximum is also increased by 1 for each INT modifier.  

Step 2 Determining Hit Points and Base Cost:

Hit Dice
Hit Dice Value	Cost per hit dice (gp)
1D4	500
1D6	750
1D8	1000
1D10	2000

Step 3 Golem Material:

The material you choose to make your golem out of will affect the cost per hit die, for example:

• 2 hit die (at 1D4 hit points each)
• made of flesh
• (500 - 100) x 2 = 800gp

Material
Material	Armour Class (AC)	Cost per hit dice (gp)
Flesh	12	-100
Wood	13	-75
Bone/Clay	14	-50
Stone	15	0
Soft Metals	16	+100
Hard Metals	17	+250
Crytal/Mystical Alloys	18	+500

Step 4 Form and Function:

Where it says cost in hit dice it simply means to take that form you need to lose one of your hit dice.  The cost however still stays the same.

Form
Body plan	Ability	Cost in hit dice
Humanoid	Can carry weapons/shield.	0HD
Beast-like	+20% land speed.	0HD
Serpent-like	+1 to grapple	0HD
Eldritch	Flight (speed 20ft)	-1HD

Function
Role	Modifications
Melee	+1 Attack Bonus (melee) per hit dice +1 Attack Bonus (ranged) 5 Inventory Slots
Ranged	+1 Attack Bonus (melee) +1 Attack Bonus (ranged) per hit dice 5 Inventory Slots.
Labour	+1 Attack Bonus (melee) +1 Attack Bonus (ranged) 15 Inventory Slots

Step 5 Special Abilities:

Now it's time to give your golem a bit of flavor!  Feel free to add any kind of ideas to augment it.

Where it says +1 hit dice as a cost that means you gain an additional hit dice for your golem!  Exciting stuff!  Despite getting extra hit dice from this table you still pay the original cost!

Abilities and Weaknesses
Modification	Description	Cost in Hit Dice
Brittle	-1AC	+ 1 Hit Dice
Weakness to X	Takes double damage from one of the following: elemental damage (one type) Sharp Blunt	+ 1 Hit Dice
Arcane Metabolism	Requires a number of spell levels equal to the golem's hit dice expended by the magic-user to power the golem for 24 hours.	+ 1 Hit Dice
Structural Flaws	Any critical hit against the golem automatically stuns it for 1D3 +1 rounds.	+ 1 Hit Dice
Shoddy Arcane Insulation	If affected by a dispelling affect the golem must save Vs magic or become inert for 1 turn.	+ 1 Hit Dice
Prismatic Lens	The golem gains a ranged attack which fires a beam of energy out of the prismatic lens. Range:30ft Damage: 1d6 (choose the type)	-1 Hit Dice
Disruptive Attacks	When struck by the golem's melee or ranged attacks the target must save Vs. paralysis or be stunned for 1 round.	-1 Hit Dice
Obscene Strength	Can use a two-handed weapon in one hand.	-1 Hit Dice
Toxic Gas	Once per day per 3 hit dice. The golem releases toxic gas from its body. Everyone within 10ft must save Vs. poison or suffer 1D6 poison damage. In addition they will suffer a -1 to ALL rolls. Lasts 1D6 +1 rounds. Does stack with itself.	-1 Hit Dice
Resistance to X	Takes half damage from one of the following: elemental damage (one type) Sharp Blunt	-1 Hit Dice
Precise Construction	Inflicts a critical hit on a 19 or 20	-1 Hit Dice

A Worked Example:

Zog the magnificent is a bit broke so he's gonna try and get as stompy a golem as possible for as cheap as possible.

• 4 hit dice (of D6) at 750gp a hit dice.
• Made out of bone reducing the price per hit dice by 50 per hit dice.
• 4 x 700 = 2,800Gp in total.
• He is going to have it in humanoid form and make it a melee golem.
• To give his golem a bit more hit points he chooses to give his golem a weakness to water and cut some corners, which leads to shoddy arcane insulation.

The result is as below:

Zog's Bone Golem

AC: 14

HD: 6

HP: 18

Damage: By weapon type

Notes:

Has a weakness to the water (x2 damage from water-based attacks.  Suffers x2 the of any non-beneficial water-based spell/ability).

If subject to any kind of dispelling effect it is stunned for 1D3 + 1 rounds.

The Tea Set of Civility

 

Good day most lovely reader.

Why not start off with my namesake.  The Tea-Set of Civility is an artefact of considerable power.  It was commissioned by some Littlefinger type who was fed up of having his devious plots ruined by stab happy nobles killing each other at his dinner parties.  A good conspiracy requires time and conversation, so if the people at your tea party are too busy murdering each other how can you effectively manipulate them?

The rules of The Tea-Set of Civility are quite simple.  When you are holding a formal tea party with guests the arcane aura of the tea set makes it impossible for you to be violent towards other guests.  You may hate the dude at the other end of the table with an all-consuming passion, they may have murdered your parents and left you with a tragic back story, or they may have even killed your dog.  No matter what you do you cannot raise a fist, sword, poison or even a cheese twist against them.  However, you can plot and scheme to your heart's content.

No one is quite sure how the tea-set does this but its power always works and no one has found a workaround yet.  However, there is a caveat.  Gatecrashers and other non-guests do not enjoy the same protection.  So going near one of these tea parties is a VERY DANGEROUS endeavour.

This makes the tea-set highly abusable.

The Tea-Set of Civility is a highly sought after artefact by monarchs, diplomats and inquisitors alike. Therefore it fetches a highly inflated price compared to other artefacts of similar power.