New Occult Releases + hack the d6 pool
New releases and design talk
During Spooky month, everything in the SPOOKY collection is on sale 20% OFF, including the new releases below!
Curios by Seb Pines
Curios is a GMless tabletop game by Seb Pines for one or more players filled with unsettling stories and surprises. Your job as Researchers is to discern what supernatural phenomena occurred. Each manila folder contains a spectra of evidence documenting a specific case:
Albrecht Manor: Open the letters of Alex Dunn, sent but never opened. Piece together the struggling writer’s research about their new home, a place filled with creeping darkness and strange noises.
Jasper Park: Seven late-season campers disappeared during a hike in Jasper Park. Sift through diary pages, photos, voicemails and the park rangers’ continued observances to discover what went wrong.
The Archivist awaits your report. Pick up your case file at The Lost Bay Studio.
Werewolves and Vampires, Montford Tales
Why not both? We’ve picked up two Tarot-driven journaling games for 1 or 2 players from Montford Tales:
Explore your secret life as a Vampire as a member of the Dead Letter Society, a 140pg A5 epistolary game.
Hungry like the wolf? Open the Almanac of Sanguine Paths, a standalone 200+ page take on the epistolary game, with Dead Letter Society integration.
Each book includes settings across six timelines, and actions for your character between letters. An epistolary game you can keep on playing between letters. Choose your gothic curse at TLBS.
INSIDE THE BAY
HACKING THE DICE POOL
I love rolling dice. It's part of what makes RPGs fun to play for me. I like it best when there are lots and lots of dice to roll. Six-sided dice are my favorite, I think. Don't get me wrong, I like the weird yet familiar polyhedral shape of the d20, and the rest of the RPG-dice-gang. But d6s just seem to have something special about them. Not sure why. It could be because they remind me of nightly dice games, played on smoky bar counters. Forgotten nights spent in the forgotten places of the Lost Bay. The kind of places where drunken Living Saints gamble on their immortality, rolling a handful of bone-carved dice between an empty pack of smokes and a cheap beer can... Or maybe it’s just because d6s can look like small tiles and can be used to generate little dungeons. Who knows!
But whatever the reason, my oddly wired brain finds d6s fast and easy to read—particularly the kind that have pips, not numbers. This makes them my favorite dice for building dice pools.
But IKO, why dice pools in the first place?
I'm not sure how it happened, but when I got back to playing RPGs, around 2018, I found myself drawn to d6-based dice pool systems, notably Freeform Universal (a word-based system without stats) and Tales from the Loop (a more traditional numerical attribute-based system).
Most of you are probably already familiar with the concept of a “dice pool”; but let's sum it up just in case. When rolling for a save/check, you build a pool, adding a die for every attribute point/item/element/circumstance involved in the action. Some dice pool systems require subtracting dice for adverse forces opposing the action (like bad weather or some sort of negative status effect, like exhaustion).
The Lost Bay RPG is d6-based as well and is a hack of the LUMEN framework. Quick example: your Force score is 3. You attempt to bash through a plaster wall. Roll on Force: 3d6. The Lost Bay requires you to roll at least a 6 for a total success or a 5 for a success with a complication. The stronger you are, the more dice you roll. You can almost physically weigh the probability of success while holding the dice in your hand right before a roll, which I really enjoy.
So what’s all this about hacking?
Our dice pools can be used to represent resources, as well as abilities. Imagine stacking little d6s for every "resource point" the character owns. TLB characters have Weird points, representing their ability to use supernatural powers. The Weirder they are, the more d6s they roll. In abstract game terms, Weird is technically both an ability score and a resource, as players spend Weird points with each roll, thus lowering the probability of success for the next roll. That is, unless the character can win back some points/resources.
TLB game has one unique mechanic for all rolls and saves, and it doesn't distinguish between ability scores and resources. This naturally leads to new mechanics like :
Spending ability scores, as in losing them, as if they were a resource
Attempting actions using exclusively resource points
Adding resource dice to an ability score-based pool
In game terms, here are some speculative examples :
Spend a Force point to force a success (ability score as resource)
Roll on Stuff (resource points as a dice pool, see below)
Borrow a point (a d6) from a resource (Luck, Mana, whatever) and add it to an ability score-based dice pool
Treating ability scores and resources in the same way leads to gameplay that blends a narrative style with a more mechanical one. And that was one of the core design goals behind TLB.
SCAVENGING STUFF
Here's a custom d6 pool mechanic, which I've used before for a post-apocalyptic campaign powered by a d6 system (doesn't matter which one).
Like in most post-apoc settings, resources were scarce (water, food, ammo, gear), and the PCs used to do a lot of scavenging. As a GM, I found writing meaningful and non-repetitive loot tables challenging. As I was designing them, I tried to guess what could have been helpful to the players: matches, glue, painkillers. I wrote super long tables that still weren't long enough. Players often lacked what they needed to overcome the perilous situations they faced. Gameplay was becoming frustrating.
That's when I introduced STUFF as a resource. Whenever the PCs succeeded at scavenging a place, they got a Stuff point. Later on, when they needed a specific (small) object, they tested their Stuff (d6 dice pool roll, one die per Stuff point), to check if they had scavenged that particular thing: a LR6 battery, a plastic bag, a coin, whatever might of been needed at the time.
This was very much inspired by the video game This War of Mine, where you can collect undefined item parts of several kinds (mechanical, electronic, etc.) that you'd then use to craft items.
To recap :
Successful scavenging = 1 Stuff point
Need something? Test your Stuff! Roll 1d6 x Stuff points
If max die = 6, you own that item
If max die = 5, you own that item, but it’ll break after the first use
In any case, lose 1 Stuff point
This obviously can also be expanded to include many various kinds of resources:
Luck, a pretty obvious one
Rage, oh, that'd be mighty and fun
Cash, bribe, buy, corrupt
Glamour, the lower the score, the most scary you look (for Vampires mostly... or maybe not!)
CPU, for a cyberpunk game
Sweat, Blood, Courage, Soul, etc
How would you hack the dice pool? Tell us in comment
And again, some entries in the little list above ride that fine line between resource and ability score: like Glamour, Courage, or Soul, they all represent both the character and things the character has that can be spent.
In a nutshell, the beauty of d6 dice-pool systems is that they can be easily hacked and extended without risking disrupting the game balance too much.
The All Flesh is Surplus game jam is still on, what will your dice pool hack for The Lost Bay RPG be? Come on in, and bring all your d6s!
VISIONS OF THE BAY
All Flesh is Surplus jam bounty. It’s been a week loaded with cool STUFF!
THE FATHOMER
Vibe, by Bawdy.Horror
This Vibe is going to put a grin on your face, and stick to your character shit a persistent smell of mud. A fantastic post-noir (as in film Noir) playable character class, for those who enjoy playing bad bois. https://bawdy-horror.itch.io/the-fathomer
Browse the rest of the entries, and submit your creation!
LA BAHÍA OLVIDADA
The full Spanish quickstart is available PWYW on itch, @ El refugio editorial
THE KNIFE EATER
In a secret channel of The Lost Bay server, a merry gang of designers is working on project <unspecified title>. An in-game notebook featuring a collection of cursed blades, all touched or used by the Knife-Eater, a roaming and restless immortal, maybe a Living Saint, probably a serial killer. The team is composed of Dión, Wren, poet117 and yours truly and writing is inspired by the terrifying art that Scragend drops, like this.
That’s all we got for you today, thanks for reading, and have a great Sunday!!!
Iko, Chris Airiau, Wren the Forrester