43: Communist Necromancers, Capitalist Liches, and The Jelly Cube Boss

Tabletop Tim: D&Daniel is dead, long live the Tabletop Tim. That’s right. I forged some signatures and got D&Daniel legally declared dead. That’ll teach him and his mischief. Thanks to our patrons Hedwig, Carlo, and A Socialist Hobgoblin. I hope you enjoy the episode. We have such sights to show you

(opening music)

Pencil: Hello and welcome to The Probably Bad Podcast, a podcast which is definitely bad. I’m Pencil

Paper: And I’m Paper. Today’s probably bad RPG idea is

(dice rolling)

Paper: “You play hitmen, but halfway through find out the setting is a generic horror world. Now you have to deal with the fact anyone you kill comes back as a wrathful ghost, and now everywhere in the setting is haunted by people who hate you.” I feel like this time we’re starting out with something I would genuinely enjoy

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: It feels like an indie video game that would do very well for like a week

Pencil: I feel like, in a lot of settings, people really gloss over the fact that if someone dies in an awful enough way there’s a non-negligible chance they will come back as a super powerful abomination

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: I feel that is something that should have more impact on world history than it does

Paper: Yeah, even in something relatively, what’s the word? Straightforward? In a lot of ways

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Like D&D, you’ve got revenants. If your players massacre someone in a horrible enough way, or fail to save them from a horrible fate, bring them back as a revenant. Trust me, it’s a fun time

Pencil: I mean, D&D has however many monster manuals it has now full of “and if you kill someone in this way, they might come back as this horrific thing”, and I feel like organised crime is going to start running into the problem fairly rapidly of revenants

Paper: Yeah, if you go Reservoir Dogs on someone, they’re coming back

Pencil: The government is going to run fairly rapidly into the problem of revenants. Communism is brought in by armies of the dead rising from their graves. I weirdly like the idea of a setting that has become a borderline utopia simply because if you start exploiting people there is a progressively higher and higher chance that a ghost is going to pull your spine out

Paper: Yeah, ‘cause I guess if there’s a 1% chance that someone you kill in a horrifying manner will come back and destroy you, if you kill 100 people, one of them is gonna come for you

Pencil: Yeah. So here’s why the undead are good, actually

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: I feel there is a genuinely very credible setting here about…I weirdly like the idea of you’re in your standard fantasy, standard mediaeval generic fantasy setting

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: Most people are serfs who die at the age of 40, etc etc, and what you’re trying to do is open a portal to the negative elemental plane to bring the undead into existence, so as to stop feudalism

Paper: So we’re talking a peasants’ revolt, but with everyone that died as well as everyone who’s alive

Pencil: Yeah, a peasants’ revolt but with armies of…I think what we’re discussing here is communist necromancers, which is a thing I’m 100% in favour of

Paper: It’s going in the title

Pencil: See, we’ve got a method here on the podcast

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: So yeah, you’ve got communist necromancers, and they’re just bringing back all of the dead that were killed by austerity, and now they’re gonna eat Boris Johnson

Paper: Yes

Pencil: Not of course that we’ve got anything against the current UK government, legally speaking

Paper: I like the idea of, as well, having a twist for the players, where they’re like “ok, we’ve got to take down this terrible lich who’s running the country now”, and as they go through it and deal with the various lower level undead, they’re like “wait, this lich was killed by having his benefits cut, and now wants to implement fully automated luxury communism?”

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: “Sure, let’s switch sides”

Pencil: I think the undead get a bad wrap, and I hope you’re all enjoying this podcast of “Mod Pencil Explains Why She’s So Pro-Undead”

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: But, you know, it’s partly just the undead coming back as friends. “I’m a revenant and my unfinished business is to hug my friends”

Paper: I like the idea of it happening with pets as well, if your pet gets run over they just come back as a zombie who really hates cars

Pencil: A car driving as 14 undead dogs chase it down, shooting rays of frost at it

Paper: Ok, but now that I say it

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: In a world where revenants exist, there should be animal revenants, ‘cause people are really mean to animals

Pencil: Yeah, so we’ve stopped poverty, we’ve stopped animal cruelty, we’ve stopped oppression, and, you know, these undead is a really great idea. This is going to be the origins episode once I become a lich queen, but

Paper: (laughs) I support your undead utopia, and would like to sign up

Pencil: So yeah, I do feel that there need to be revenants and ghosts whose unfinished business is something like, you know, I would like a little smooch on the forehead, or something

Paper: But going back to the way that the actual idea treats it

Pencil: Mmm

Paper: It does also feel like a good way to deal with murder-hobo characters

Pencil: Yeah. I feel like genuinely if every time you killed a character you rolled a 1d100, on a 1 it comes back as a revenant. You’ve successfully disincentivised murder-hoboing

Paper: Yeah, because they’re just going to have to kill you again

Pencil: And if you kill the revenant you roll the dice again, there’s a 100% chance that comes back as a meta-revenant

Paper: We really can’t go back to metaghosts

Pencil: No, this is a meta-revenant, they’re different

Paper: So what are the attributes of a meta-revenant?

Pencil: So, a revenant wants to get revenge on its murderer, that’s its thing. A meta-revenant wants to get revenge on the series of events that led up to its murder. It’s got a higher level of understanding of cause and effect

Paper: Ok, so a regular revenant just kills the killer

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: A meta-revenant deals with depravation and desperation and social inequality that leads people to commit crimes

Pencil: Yes, and a meta-meta-meta-revenant attempts to reshape the laws of physics so that things can’t die anymore

Paper: I’m into it

Pencil: As a revenant gets brought back more and more it just gets a broader and broader definition of who constitutes responsible for its muder

Paper: A meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-revenant sets out to kill all psychopomps, which is tricky

Pencil: Yeah, and a meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-revenant sets out to beat up the GM, sot hey can’t run the game any more

Paper: (laughs) Just appears, fully formed, at the GM’s door like “hi, I would like a word”

Pencil: So, I realise it is literally unplayable

Paper: He-he

Pencil: But I do love the idea of

Paper: Lich-erally

Pencil: I did a finger gun, but none of you can see it, because this is a podcast

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: But yeah, monsters that attack you IRL, which I think is non-consensual larping, which I think is assault, but…

Paper: I do also like the general idea of playing a hitman in a horror setting

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: ‘Cause the amount of tools that you would have to gather. What if the client doesn’t know that the target is some sort of supernatural creature, so it’s just like “yeah, just shoot him in the head or whatever”, and then you do it and the head just sort of reforms, and the guy’s just like “who was that? I’m taking you down”

Pencil: (impersonating a teacher) Who did it?

Paper: Come on, own up. I’m not cross

(both) I’m just disappointed

Pencil: One sort of, I can’t remember where I heard this, but one plot idea I saw was you’re a hitman, and you kill someone, but they’ve got some sort of supernatural thing where they resurrect each night, so you’re just going to have to keep re-hitmanning them

Paper: I feel like you should ask for extra pay for that

Pencil: Yeah. I guess

Paper: Maybe that’s more of a salaried hitman position, where you’re paid to keep that person dead?

Pencil: Yeah. Which, weirdly, does make sense in worlds with resurrection and travel to the afterlife, and undead and stuff. You’ve got your standard hitmen, who just kill people, and then you’ve got your mega-hitmen, who make sure the person actually stays dead

Paper: Well yeah, even in your standard vampire mythology

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: You can pay someone to stake them once, or you can give someone a salary to sit by the coffin every night and stake them as soon as they try and get up

Pencil: Then a mega-mega-mega-hitman kills the GM, so that they can no longer keep running the game. I also do like the idea of a big bad whose motivation is to stop the GM running the game. Or, as I like to call it, my player character

Paper: I mean, in a way, aren’t you describing the game The End of the World

Pencil: Yeah. Yeah, I guess so

Paper: Where, for those who are unaware, the first thing that happens is the apocalypse kills the DM

Pencil: Yeah, it is a game set where you are yourself in the apocalypse, and the first thing that happens is, yeah, the GM immediately dies, which I feel should be the case in all games

Paper: Just anywhere, like “you all meet up in a tavern, and this guy called Steve, who looks exactly like me, just drops dead for no reason. Anyway…”

Pencil: “You arrive on a space station in the year 3000 just as I, personally, am flung out the airlock”

Paper: (laughs) I don’t know why I called myself Steve in that scenario, it’s just our go-to name

Pencil: Yeah, eventually we shall all become Steve, in the great Steve uprising

Paper: “You arrive in a tavern as that guy from Minecraft is killed”

Pencil: So, “the undead are good actually” is the takeaway from this episode

Paper: Apparently it is

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Paper: So our first question is, from pardon my Spanish, but, que-chucha, who sent us a very long question that I pasted into google docs, and it was half a page, so I have paraphrased it. Please do not send us messages about cutting down your question, it was very long. “I’m running a real world campaign set in my home city, and I’m struggling to make monsters that fit in, eg. ochre ooze in the form of a guy that sells off-brand toys in the subway. How far can I go without making it not feel like D&D anymore?”

Pencil: Ok, so, step one, you need necromancer communists. I really love the idea of D&D but the monsters are just, you know, here’s a bunch of bugbears, they do tax fraud. You need to stop the monsters, but the crimes they’re doing are just incredibly white collar, middle class crimes

Paper: I’m gonna be honest, I’m curious why this ochre ooze off-brand toy seller had to die. Was he doing some evil ooze stuff as well as selling off-brand toys, ‘cause you did not say

Pencil: You work for Mattel, and you’re shutting down competitors

Paper: Ah, it’s an evil campaign, got it

Pencil: I do weirdly love the idea of, you know, whatever generic Sauron knock-off it is enters our dimension and just starts selling bootleg DVDs. Just really powerful evil monsters, but they’re doing really trivial things

Paper: Yeah, there’s definitely things that you could do that are low-level evil like, I dunno, maybe if you increase the level of background evil in the world enough, something magical happens, and Sauron does come back

Pencil: “Increase the amount of background evil in the world and something magical will happen” - Mod Paper, 2021. I feel like the two ways to do this. Way number one is Shadowrun approach, “you’ve got a pit fiend and it is running a company with all of its devil minions, and you need to infiltrate the company and stop it doing evil shit”

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: And at that point you have a more espionage-style dungeon run, but it’s still a dungeon run. The other approach, I guess, is more along the lines of “oh no, there’s a dragon in the supermarket storage room, somebody go stop it”

Paper: Yeah. I feel like there’s a core flaw with the question, with “how far can I go without making it not feel like D&D any more”. Is that a problem, if it doesn’t feel like a standard D&D thing? ‘Cause if you’re using the D&D ruleset, I feel like you’re still playing D&D

Pencil: Yeah, I think there are ways to do D&D, ways to do your standard dungeon crawl in modern day settings, basically

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: “Ah-ha! Instead of a spooky dungeon, we’ve entered a military base.” But yeah, I think a modern day one is going to be not like a standard D&D thing, just by virtue of what’s happening in it, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea

Paper: But there is also the thing of, you know, other RPG systems exist, and maybe a different one would be more suited to what you’re doing

Pencil: Like Shadowrun

Paper: Yeah. Or something like Monster of the Week, or FATE, where it’s a lot more open to the DM doing whatever it is they want to do

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: You can still use these sorts of monsters, ‘cause most of them are taken from mythology anyway

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: Or folklore, or something like that, it’s just a question of are you particularly attached to using D&D mechanics for this

Pencil: Yeah, I think if you’re going for modern day dungeon crawls, then yeah, D&D could still work, and yeah, when that hypothetical book distribution company has turned evil and is being run by liches, although not the good liches who are doing communism, these ones are the bad liches

Paper: Capitalist liches

Pencil: Yeah. You’ve got the capitalist liches, and the communist liches, and you need to fight a war between them. I just, sorry, I just love the idea of oozes running organised crime, you know, “take them to the boss”, and then they just bring you into a room with a gelatinous cube with a fedora

Paper: Yeah, instead of drowning you in the sea they just kind of push you into the boss

Pencil: Yeah. I want to know if the gelatinous cube is very intelligent, or if it’s still as mindless as a normal gelatinous cube, and all of the instructions are just pareidolia based on its jiggling

Paper: I feel like what it is is that the gelatinous cube was adopted as whatever the baby form is called by a regular crime boss, and it

Pencil: Gelatinous square

Paper: (amused pause) Now that it’s become 3D, it’s inherited the job, possibly by bumping off its adopted parent, who knows

Pencil: It’s just got a tommy gun floating in it

Paper: But it’s not particularly competent at it, but because it was the heir, no-one dares to question it, and just go along with it, mostly doing their own thing and just saying “oh yeah, it’s all for the boss, definitely”

Pencil: It’s got a little tommy gun floating inside it, and that’s what it uses to shoot people. Yeah, gelatinous cubes start of as a gelatinous dot, then they become a line, then they become a square, and then they become a cube

Paper: And that’s why you need to clean up all spilled jelly immediately. If you leave it long enough it will become a gelatinous cube

Pencil: Yes, and then take over all organised crime. But yes, I think our answers are either run a sort of modern day dungeon crawl in a government base or secret facility or something, try Monster of the Week, or have a large pile of jelly run the mafia

Paper: Some of these are not mutually exclusive

Pencil: True, true

Paper: You can run Monster of the Week and still have a large pile of jelly run the mafia

Pencil: Just, a gelatinous cube comes at you and then just hops in a car, and then chases you down in a car

Paper: I just wanna see someone try and tailor a fancy suit for a cube. Would you still give it arms as a respect thing?

Pencil: They just dangle by its side

Paper: Or would it be less respectful to give it arms? You know?

Pencil: Yeah, this is cube territory

Paper: Do cubes require trousers? Or do they just have sort of a pinstripe sheet?

Pencil: I love the idea of a pinstripe suit. It’s just a pinstripe suit, and it’s just got a gelatinous cube squeezed into it, and then during combat it just bursts out

Paper: Well this is my thinking, ‘cause it would be difficult to tailor it, because you’d try and measure the cube and your tape-measure would just start sinking into it

Pencil: I guess it would be a gelatinous tent? No, a pinstripe tent

Paper: I mean, I feel like it would have to also be gelatinous

Pencil: Yes

Paper: Just stick some stripey jelly on the side like “yep, it’s a great suit, boss, you look sharp and dapper”

Pencil: It makes a happy burbling noise

Paper: (laughs) Oh no, you made it cute!

Pencil: ‘Cause the thing is, it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, just randomly shaking with a tommy gun inside it, just goes off at random points when the jelly happens to press against the trigger. So you’ve got this happy burbling gelatinous cube in a pinstripe suit and fedora randomly shooting at walls

Paper: And if it gets you, that’s just a sign that the boss is angry

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: That’s just how it is

Pencil: They call him Cubey Steve

Paper: Trying to decipher what the cube is trying to say from the pattern of bullet holes in the wall

Pencil: I think what we’ve come up with here is a really interesting cult

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: The messiah has returned, but is in the body of a gelatinous cube. Everyone’s just like “well, guess we’re worshipping this now, let’s try to decipher what it’s saying”

Paper: That’s an RPG idea right there

Pencil: Yeah. Next

Paper: I hope we helped

Pencil: (inaudible) like gelatinous cubes. Our last, our next question is anonymous. “How do you choose bonds, flaws, etc for your characters?” So I don’t. Ha-ha! Question ended

Paper: Yeah, I mean, I tend to not as well, just ‘cause I tend to have…I see them as more of a roleplaying guide, rather than something your characters need. It’s useful when you don’t have…if you’re either new to roleplaying or you don’t have a solid idea of what your character’s personality is already

Pencil: Yeah, I use them if I’ve got to that point and I don’t know what my character is like

Paper: Yeah, and there’s, there’s obviously, there’s rolling on the tables of ones for your background, and stuff like that. One thing that I’ve done in the past, actually, is I have a notebook where I write down quotes that I find funny or interesting, a lot of them are those surprisingly deep quotes that turn out to be from Halo and things, and if the ones in the background don’t particularly appeal to me, I’ll just pick some randomly out of there and just interpret them

Pencil: Yeah. So, I think when I do choose bonds I generally choose them rather than rolling for them, I only do it when I’m completely lost on a character, which I usually am, because I’m not very good at roleplaying, but

Paper: Not true! No self diss!

Pencil: I, yeah, I think…what do I think? My flaw, in case you were wondering, IRL, is that I can’t talk for more that 30 seconds before devolving into some kind of muppet-style beaker routine

Paper: Yeah, well this is a pro-muppet podcast, so that’s not actually an insult

Pencil: Right, yes. Nick, edit things so I sound competent. But yeah, I think a lot of cases bonds and flaws should probably come more organically, wahey, from the original character concept

Paper: Yeah, looking at the character you’ve made, because they come with your background, so, as a rules as written, so they tend to be one of the last things you do

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: So looking at the character you’ve made, and kind of going “ok but why? Why are they like this?” and then you can get an idea

Pencil: Also a useful to have, if you’ve got an otherwise very compassionate healy person, if you have “they consider this group of people to be utterly irredeemable”, it can be useful to bring that into the thing, like “ok, so why is that, why is there such a difference”

Paper: Why is my character medical racism?

Pencil: Yeah. If you get a bond or something that’s very very different from the way your character normally acts, it can be useful to be a kind of why is this one thing such an exception to their normal behaviour

Paper: Yeah. It’s also, honestly, worth looking at the tables for other things, ‘cause your character is not just this one situation that they’ve been in. For example, if you’re looking at the urchin one, the urchin background, and you can’t see anything that particularly appeals, but you either can’t, or don’t want to, think of a whole new one, think about what they might have done while they were being an urchin, you know? Where they on their own, or where they doing crimes, and then you can look at something else and try and find something that’ll fit them. Sorry, I accidentally did a good advice, that’s not what this is. That’s not what this podcast is

Pencil: So, what you need to do is figure out what the other players IRL bonds and flaws are, and just use those, so your character is an elaborate roast towards everyone else in the group

Paper: I mean, honestly, it’s, again, it’s not a bad idea to just think of “here is a fictional character that I would like this character to be like, what’s their personality like”

Pencil: Except in this case the fictional character is your GM

Paper: I mean, aren’t we all fictional characters, what is the self if not an elaborate construct?

Pencil: My self is actually an elaborate aberration

Paper: Fair enough

Pencil: But yes, I feel like we have come up with some…so. Yeah, I think there’s not really a lot of bad advice we can give here, I don’t think there’s really a bad way to give your character bonds and flaws. As long as your bonds and flaws aren’t “I refuse to go on any adventures, my character has sworn an oath never to follow any plot hooks presented to them”

Paper: Yeah, I mean you could even just put the same basic thought in all four boxes, ‘cause then it’s just like, it’s almost like emphasising different parts of that thought

Pencil: Yeah, I feel like, so one of my genuine character things is I think the discussion vis a vis characters need to have flaws isn’t necessarily the best way of looking at it. You can have a character who’s, say, deeply honourable, and that could be a flaw in certain situation, and it could be entirely beneficial in other ones, and likewise your character being very unscrupulous and…there’s very few traits that are just straightforwardly flaws

Paper: Mm-hmm

Pencil: And very few traits that are just straightforwardly benefits

Paper: It’s almost like job interviews, isn’t it, like “what’s your biggest weakness?”

Pencil: There’s one. Put as your character’s flaw that they’re too much of a perfectionist

Paper: My character is not satisfied until their job is done

Pencil: My character’s greatest flaw is an unwavering faith in late-stage capitalism

Paper: (laughs)

Pencil: There you go, we got a bad idea out of it, you don’t need to cancel the podcast

Paper: Excellent. If you would like to do the opposite of cancelling the podcast, which is giving us money, we’re on patreon. Sorry, that was the worst segue yet

Pencil: (laughs) The worst segue so far

Paper: We’re on patreon as probably bad RPG ideas. If you want access to bonus episodes, such as roasting the most anti-sjw RPG of all time, or homebrew such as a wild magic focused ranger, or your just want to hear D&Daniel, the voice of the podcast, say your name, throw us some money to keep the podcast going. I spent some of last month’s patreon money on a mobility aid, it’s great. If you have a question you can send it to us on tumblr, probably bad RPG ideas, or email probably bad podcast at gmail dot com. If you want merch, we’re on redbubble as probablybad, and we’re on twitter as badprobably. So thank you for listening

Both: And remember to have a probably bad day

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