Day 16 Main Prompt: Quick to Learn.

Some of the absolute best games are the ones where it is easy to grasp the basics but there is a lot of depth in strategy. Checkers comes to mind as does Risus. Risus, The Anything RPG was created by visionary game designer S. John Ross and at the core it is a very simple game. Your character is made up of a number of cliches such as two fisted adventuring archeologist or world’s best fighter pilot or even hairdresser to the stars. You have a score in that cliche that determines how many dice you roll when you use it to resolve a challenge or conflict. You add up those dice and are trying to beat either a target number or the roll of an opponent. Easy Peasy.

But that isn’t all, there are numerous strategies you can follow to maximize your character and how you use their cliches plus there are tons of variants and house rules which optimize the game from being a gritty, dungeon crawl to an even simpler game! Heck there is a 64 page Risus Companion with loads of options plus countless blogs, forum posts and a couple discords dedicated to this 30 year old game.

You can download Risus for free here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/170294/Risus-The-Anything-RPG

Day 16 Alternate Prompt: Dungeon and my d10 roll is a 2, Create a NPC

He’s been down here for a long time he has. The other denizens of the dungeon leave him be, live and let live they call it. He isn’t interested in them anyway, he came here to get away from humans, luckily the only ones that come down here are those pesky adventurers and they are his primary means of entertainment.

Today’s NPC is a deformed physic of great power. He is disillusioned and hateful towards humanity after the way he was treated as a child and his mother was burned at the stake for witchcraft. He will use his powers to try to trick the party into thinking he is a hurt adventurer himself and needs help. Once they let down their guard he will attempt to trick them and kill them one by one, often keeping the physically weakest member of the party alive for weeks of glorious toture.

Make our villain an incredibly powerful physic but fairly weak physically. At the minimum he should have the ability to:

Disguise himself (his natural form is deformed and horrible to look at)

Shield his mind from detect alignment or detect evil or telepathy / empathy

Create illusions / delusions both visible and auditory

Telekinesis

Inflict blindness / hearing loss

That’s all for today, until tomorrow be excellent to each other!

August is #RPGaDay2024 and I am going to posting daily responses to the prompts. You can find more information about #RPGaDAY2024 here: https://www.autocratik.com/2024/07/announcing-rpgaday2024-for-august.html

There are two sets of prompts this year and since I have room to do so on the blog I will answer both. In episode S2E6 of my podcast titled RPGaDAY2024 Panel Discussion I assemble an esteemed panel and we go through the main prompts for the entire month’s so I will try to give different answers here on the blog but may end up repeating myself occasionally.  

On their podcast Mirke the Meek suggested using the alternate prompts to create a setting and that is a great idea so I’m going to steal that. The setting I am going to craft for this month will be a modern, conspiracy style setting. Nominally I think we’ll set it in the 1970’s to avoid the problems cell phones and the internet can cause if player characters have access to them.

Here are the main prompts:

And here are a set of alternative prompts suggested by Skala Wyzwania, look at the day on the left, pick the theme, then roll d10.