Sunday, 9 February 2025

Rituals—including when they go wrong

The process of revising PARIAH continues apace. The most recent uploads to itch.io include two zinis-worth of rituals (amounting to a total of 3500 words), most of which are updated versions of magic previously published here or in PARIAH Vol. Rituals come in two distinct flavours: 

  • Sorcerous rituals are concerned with invoking, conjuring, binding and banishing spirits to achieve a variety of magical ends. There are set procedures to follow, but these can be varied.
  • Mystic rituals (formerly known as "shamanic") are much more specific in terms of both the procedure and the outcome
Within the world of pariah these rituals can be learned by anyone: there are no special talents or gifts required beyond knowledge. All of the Mystic rituals are learned by pariahs after assisting a set number of times. though not made explicit, the implication is that assisting in a ritual at least once offers some chance of it succeeding if attempted. Simply put, if usually I need to have assisted this ritual 3 times before "knowing" it: if I have assisted on only 1 occasion, I could ty doing it for myself... with a 33% chance of succeeding.

Spread from AHPZ21: Sorcerous Rituals

But what does failure mean, beyond the ritual not working. The sorcerous rituals have a failure system built in: there are displeased spirits, the necessity of entering their debt, and a series of random mishaps. But the mystic rituals are highly specific: it stands to reason that there should be highly specific outcomes for when they go wrong, too... so while I was at first reluctant to share these again, providing failure scenarios alongside them presents a good enough excuse to do so.

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

Exploring the Dawn Realm (RPG Blog Carnival Worlds Beyond)

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is curated by VDoughnut of VDonnut Valley and is titled: Other, Between, and Under – The Worlds Beyond. I have several of these parallel realities sitting around (or stacked on top of each other, like paper plates), many of which I'm actively working on. So this feels almost a little cheeky. I may have to do another before the month is out to show my seriousness.

This is a post about the DAWN REALM, the nearest thing Pariah has to a the feywilde. It's the source of organic life, illusion magic, charms and mutations where nothing is ever created or destroyed but often converted into other forms.

And while it bleeds, constantly, into the Here & Now, the best way to experience it first hand is through a heroic dose of Dawn Mushrooms.

In essence this is a depth crawl with a guaranteed end, as it uses real time (10 mins = 1 turn, ends after 12 turns) and most encounters are resolved conversationally.

An ink drawing by Jef Cox from Pariah volume 1

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Navigating the City of a Hundred Gods—Another Approach to the City

In ancient times a man named Patrick Stuart shared a post about wrapping a dungeon around a die to create a non-Euclidean adventure site: http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2011/09/did-i-invent-this.html

I think about it a lot, and have been playing with multiple iterations of the concept for a number of years... but only recently did I consider it an interesting way to approach the "city crawl", specifically the settlement slowly being described in the City of a Hundred Gods series of posts

A hex map of a city, repeating endlessly.