Rpg Mechanics Stolen from Clearance Rack Boardgames

Here are a couple board games I picked up from clearance bins. They each have interesting mechanics which can be stolen and incorporated into tabletop rpg encounters.

Attack on Titan

BGG link. One-versus-all boss battle. Based on a show about fighting giant monsters called titans. 

I picked this one up because I like the designer's other work. The main problem it has as a board game is that the titan's side of things isn't very engaging. If the titan was automated, then it could be a satisfying cooperative dice-rolling puzzle thingy. 

But it had some really fun little ideas:

Climbing on the Beast:

First of all, the human characters move up and down these little cardboard standees. The ground counts as a space, as does each layer of the tower, and about half of the locations represent the humans climbing up the titan, shadow of colossus style. Some spaces allow you to do special actions, like firing the cannons from the tower, while others are places you need to maneuver to accomplish certain objectives.

This is just good fun.  And you don't really need a 3d prop to accomplish this effect. Just lay up some index cards indicating certain points-of-interest atop whatever giant monster is being fought.

The Deck of ̶M̶a̶n̶y̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ Just One Thing, (and That Thing is Bees.)

The Deck of Just One Thing, and That Thing is Bees.

This powerful relic takes the appearance of a deck of cards. Once per day, you may take a draw from the deck. Before you draw a card, you must declare how many cards you wish to draw. Then randomly draw exactly that many. Each card causes some magical effect to immediately occur. The magical effect is always bees.

If an effect refers to "[cards]", that means the number of cards you drew. So if you drew 7 cards, then "[cards] minutes" means "7 minutes".

Unless otherwise mentioned, any summoned creatures or items last until dawn (or 0 hp) before vanishing.

To use this in a game, draw cards from a deck of Tarot cards and consult the tables below.

If you are using a poker deck, then just ignore the knight cards and trumps. And treat the red/black jokers as The Fool and the Pagat, respectively.

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Clubs - Carpenter Bees

Ace: Summon Xylie, the jumbo sized carpenter bee. 

    About the size of a beachball. Really good at chewing through wood. Can burrow a passage large enough for a human to crawl through at a rate of 1 foot per minute.

    Loves to imagine herself as a master thief and will volunteer to help with heists, but terribly clumsy and makes lots of noise. Enjoys chatting about food and carpentry, spitting out pulped wood as she talks. Terrified of birds.

   (2 HD, no armor, 1 damage sting, flies at half normal speed.)

2-10: Summon a swarm of 2-10 regular carpenter bees.

X normal blue carpenter bees appear, where X is the number of pips on the card you drew. 

- They don't speak your language, but you can magically order them around. 

- They move as a unit, and have X hp. Each bee that dies reduces the swarm's hp by 1 and vice versa.  

- The swarm can attack for dX damage. (Carpenter bees  don't die when they sting; that's a honeybee thing.)

Massive Community Hexcrawl - Interactive Map

This is a janky interactive implementation of the Massive Community Hexcrawl, orchestrated by Skerples. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, etc.

Click on a hex, and its description will appear down below.

A standalone version of this map can be found here. You can save the html file, and then easily edit the hex descriptions in a text editor. That version should also look nicer on larger screens.

Click on a hex.

Platescape: Outer Plates of Cuisine

Once again, my deepest apologies to Zeb Cook.

In the Planescape setting, the Inner Planes are worlds each comprised purely of some classical element. In the totally unrelated Platescape setting, the Inner Plates are each comprised purely of some food group. You can read more about that here.

In Planescape, there's also a great wheel of Outer Planes, corresponding to the standard D&D alignments of Good vs. Evil and Lawful vs. Chaotic. In Platescape, the Outer Plates correspond to the different kinds of dining experiences.

On one axis, we have Delicious vs. Repulsive. Delicious cuisine aims to evoke gustatory pleasure, satisfying the desires of the diner. Repulsive cuisine eschews these desires as irrelevant, or actively seeks to create an unpleasant dining experience.

On the other axis, we have Healthy vs. Unhealthy. Healthy cuisine aims to provide the diner with the optimal profile of macro and micronutrients. Unhealthy doesn't give a hoot.

Behold! The Great Smörgåsbord Cosmology:

The Outer Plates
The Iron Heavens	The Test Kitchens	Grillysium	Hunting Grounds	Party Mountain
Grandmarcadia		↑Delicious↑		Valhalunch
Dietus, the Fitness Nirvana	←Healthy	Everything Bagel	Unhealthy→	LIMBO
The March		↓Repulsive↓		The Empty Pan
Super-food Hell	Ghhhhgh	Compost Bin	Cosmic Supermax	The Abyss

——=== 🥪 ===—— 

Doors, Shores, and Parallel Zones: a guide to the boundaries between worlds

So you're jumping around between parallel dimensions.  But what's the crossover like?

Here's a quick taxonomy, sorted in increasing order of smoothness.

 

Doors 

(Also known as gates, portals, wormholes, cosmic glory holes, or rifts. )

An enclosed frame holding a flat region of warped space which is connected to a paired surface elsewhere in the cosmos. Any particle which passes through the frame is transported to the other world. (Some doors connect to an intermediary demiplane, and so resemble a tunnel.)

These are the most common and easiest-to-understand type of planar boundary, and most cross-dimensional spells work by opening these doors.

The defining characteristic of this kind of boundary is that local space is entirely normal close to the boundary and then experiences a discontinuity.

d6 doors found in the Plates of Flavor:

1. A small pond of cream found in the Plate of Sweets. Jump in and you'll pop out of a similar pond in the Plate of Meats. Unfortunately, the pond has a tendency to move around when no one is paying attention to it.
2. An elephant-sized peach pit lays in the deserts of the Plate of Seed. Small tunnels dot its surface, just large enough to crawl through. Most of the tunnels are shelter to vermin, but one opens out into a giant half-eaten peach in the valley of unripened fruit. 
3. The city of Everything Bagel, found at the center of the Great Buffet of the outer plates, is just riddled with doors. Nobody actually lives there except for the Lady of Propane. All the other people bustling about were just unfortunate enough to have a random portal open up connected to their refrigerator or shower drain or something like that.
4. If you dig deep into the crust of the pastry plains, sometimes you'll find a pocket of filling connecting to some other world. A custard pocket connecting to the plain of sweets. A pocket of garbage connecting to the prime material. Etc.
5. Dionysus has a big inter-dimensional portal that he just uses to dump half-eaten chicken wings.  No clue where the other end opens up.
6. Dump enough fish sauce into any whirlpool and it will briefly transform into a portal to the shallow sea.

Hyperbolic Shores

A transition into another world with noticeable spatial distortions, but no discontinuities.

For example, you're in the Boiling Oil Ocean, cruising around on your turnip barge. You see an island made of meat off in the distance, giant billowing fingers dressing its shores. After cruising around a bit, the island doesn't seem too large. But when you land and go to explore its interior, you find that it's infinitely large and in fact contains the entire Elemental Plate of Meat.

Meanwhile, from the Meat side of things, you approach a lake of oil. You can easily walk around the entire thing in a matter of hours, but can't see across to the shore on the other side. The lake, is in fact, the entirety of the infinite Plate of Oil.

Another common kind of shore are the ones that form in large book collections. As we all know, a dense enough concentration of knowledge can cause spacial distortions, making libraries and bookstores bigger on the inside or even connecting them to L-space. Because such distortions are noticeable, but locally continuous, they count as Shores.

Parallel Zones

Characterized by a transition to another world despite the lack of absolutely any sort of spatial distortion.

You know, that crazy fairy kind of stuff where you're walking in the woods down a path you've travelled many times before, but it's unusually spooky this time and then somehow you find yourself trapped in an endless twilight forest. And it turns out it's because the vice-archduchess of the fey or whomever wanted to look at your hat was lined with beaver pelt from a particular magical beaver is seeking its revenge. Okay, we're back. It's fine.

Mathpost: Coordinates on a tesselating hexagonal world.

Turn back now, if ye be looking for some narrative content. This be nothin' but a big wad of barely polished geometry.


Basic idea is that you live on a giant flat plane that loops. (As in this story) Go far enough in any direction, and you'll end up back where you started. Navigational systems evolve to meet the needs of the people using them. What kind of system of coordinates would be useful for navigating on a looping hex?

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Rectangular Coords

X: Y:

Hexline Offset Coords

A: B: C:

 Unit length is equal to the inner radius of the hex.

(X,Y) coordinates are the standard Cartesian kind.

(A,B,C) coordinates are "Hexline Offsets". Basically, choose 2 opposite edges of the hex perimeter, and draw parallel lines first through the origin and then through your point. The absolute value of coordinate is the ratio of (the distance between the point and the line through the origin) and (the distance between the center and the perimeter line)

Further Explanation 

More detailed unpolished explanation below.

Neither the images nor text were optimized, so everything is a bit too large.