# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 08 - Wicked Ones :: Slander, Snakeman Pirate Necromancer tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/wicked-ones > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] I know, I know. Absolutely slacking for not getting a character posted just after midnight. It's almost like I decided to recharge some mental batteries rather than stay up late tweaking a character sheet. Don't worry, all is well. Today we are taking on **[[Wicked Ones]]**, and it's definitely coming to my attention that most of the games that I've picked up in the last couple of years have in one way or another been derived from the lineage that started at **[[Blades in the Dark]]**. Not all of them, certainly, but a surprising number. ![[Wicked Ones (cover).jpg|400]] **Wicked Ones** has as its central conceit something that has been tried before but I don't think has ever been done as well as you see here: allowing you to play the bad guys, the monsters in a fantasy game. Odds are good that it's going to be pretty high fantasy because that gives you the largest scope of play. What kind of monsters would you have if they didn't have a dungeon? Creating, designing, maintaining, and expanding the dungeon is an important part of playing **Wicked Ones**, which is absolutely fascinating. For those people who really love drawing a dungeon on grid paper, this is going to make them grin from ear to ear. We'll be subverting a lot of that expectation here shortly, but be cool. We'll get there. Another thing that we are going to be doing is using *the solo rules*. Why would I do that? Because it's appropriate. Sometimes you just want to play with yourself. Sometimes you just don't want to deal with other people. Sometimes you just want to be monstrous in private. I've got your hookup. Let's get started. ## Chargen This is one more of those books that I appreciate introduces the bulk of the resolution mechanics right up front and only then gives you character generation. Not only that, sections that refer to other things are clearly marked with what chapter and page they're on, which is just organizationally pleasant. ### You Monster Let's start with the very personal part of this, creating our monster. More things are going to drop on to us later – for the moment… Who are we? What do we want? And how do we get it? Violence and terror is the answer to the last question. By the way. #### Monster Races > The world is littered with “normal” monsters - goblin farmers and orc fisherman, weaklings that huddle in their tiny villages far from civilization, hoping humans don’t cast an eye on them. But that’s not you - you crave power and riches. You spit on those fools, hiding in their straw huts. No, you’re a Wicked One and you're looking to carve out your own place in this world. Short version: As long as it's relatively mechanically important, you can be any sort of monster race you want. Orc, goblin, undead skeleton, dark elf… If your effectiveness is essentially humanoid with two arms and two legs, you're good to go. Though if you want to be something a little more extreme… There are some advanced choices available in the back of the book. Like the absolutely-not-a-mindflayer which has some fairly advanced psionic powers but absolutely needs to eat living brains on a regular basis to be functional. (Did I mention *[[i-fucking-love-illithid|I Fucking Love Illithid]]*?) Or the absolutely-not-a-beholder which is incredibly paranoid, incredibly flexible for leveling up, and has a bunch of eyes that throw different effects. Or the – actually, this is absolutely a dragon. There's no question about that. You start tiny and relatively ineffectual as an egg, you gain powers by simply collecting gold, and you can grow to be truly monstrous. ![[Wicked Ones Goldmonger.png]] We are'n't going to be taking one of the advanced choices, even though it's very tempting. Instead we're going to take one of the monster races which is unique (relatively unique) to WO: the Slissik, who are a fabulous take on snake people. Truthfully the art throughout the game for them always makes me smile.^[The art in general for this book is top notch. Animated without being too silly. Stylish. Charming.] ![[Wicked Ones Slissiks.jpg]] This is an excellent example of the character descriptors in the book. Personality profile, general feel, names which give a general sense of type. Far be it from me to break ranks so we are going with the classic Slissik name: *Slander.* Okay, maybe not classic, but it fits the mold. Because the game specifically instructs us to go light on any kind of background and generally just try to be new to the area, I'm going to say that Slander is a traveller from distant Lemuria who has been having a rough go of it and looking for a place to settle down. Or at least figure out what to do with his life. *NARRATOR: Spoiler alert. Neither of these things happen.* All monsters speak the Dark Tongue while civilized factions speak the Light Tongue. With effort, your PC can learn Light Tongue with appropriate investment or get some minions who speak the language with one of their upgrades. But most monsters know a few words. And here's the list: ![[Wicked Ones Light Tongue Guide.jpg]] If that doesn't summarize exactly what minion races are generally limited to in most fantasy games when it comes to expressing themselves, I don't know what is. It's perfect. #### The Calling Having figured out what kind of monster we are, what's going on in our lives, and generally oriented ourselves, it's time to pick a calling. A calling represents what you do and how you do it. It would be referred to as your "class" in less refined, well designed games. Each calling get you a core ability which is something unique you can do, the ability to narrate *flashbacks* of things that characters who do what you do would be able to, *calling abilities* which are things that you know how to do and can buy more of with XP, or a *flexibility slot* which lets you take a calling ability from another calling, as long as it's not a core ability. Some abilities allow you to spend stress in order to activate them. This being a FITD game, you also get stress by resisting consequences. It's a resource that when fully expended causes you to *go feral*. We'll get there. The full list of callings goes BRUTE, CONNIVER, CRAFTER, HUNTER, MARAUDER, SHADOW, SHAMAN, WARLOCK, ZEALOT. You can probably figure out what each of them does. I think there's only really one choice for me here; Slander must be a *Warlock*. I think you know where this is going. ![[Wicked Ones Warlock.jpg]] #### Calling Ability We get the core ability and one calling ability from the list. > *Sorcery:* You have mastered a magic path (choose one): enchantment -> evocation -> force mastery - illusion - necromancy - pyromancy. You can spend stress to Invoke tier 2 and tier 3 spells of your path. It's *necromancy*. It was always going to be necromancy. There was never a world in which this wasn't going to be necromancy. Warlocks can flashback the things warlocks could have thought to do like *acquiring arcane knowledge*, *striking occult deals*, or *creating magic items*.^[Explicit flashback mechanics are something that really doesn't get used enough in games and when it does they are usually heist games. I love them. It gives you an opportunity to succeed or fail based on inserted flashbacks to narrative that happened sometime before the moment of play. It's hilarious to be put in a situation, call for a flashback, play it out, fail the roll to achieve what you wanted, and then snap back to real time in order to play out the explanation of why you just failed that what you attempted in the first place. It's an unexpected bit of cinematic action.] I also have to pick up one of the classic, absolutely required abilities for the genre. > *Reaper* > > When you deliver a killing blow with a weapon, you reap the soul of your victim. You can expend this soul later to cast a spell without spending stress, also taking +1d on the roll. You can only hold one reaped soul at a time. Needless to say, Slander carries a massive fucking scythe with an ornate blade. Because why wouldn't he? #### Choose Actions Now we flip through the actions, referred to as Stats in many other games, and do some assignment. Three dots in one, two dots into two more, and one dot into two final actions. | Attribute | Action | d | | ---- | ---- | ---: | | Brains | Scan | 2 | | | Tinker | 0 | | | Trick | 0 | | Muscles | Finesse | 1 | | | Skulk | 0 | | | Smash | 0 | | Guts | Banter | 1 | | | Invoke | 3 | | | Threaten | 2 | It's a good thing for us that the mechanics allow for gaining XP in in an Action that you have zero dice in. Even if you fail. That's probably going to come in handy later. #### Dark Impulse You wanted it to get spicy, right? Every monster has a *dark impulse*, a compulsion, something that drives them to screw things up, motivates them to undercut their own actions, possesses them entirely when they go feral. It also screws over your friends. Why would you ever have such a thing? Firstly it's fun. It's hard to argue that. Secondly, when you max out your stress and it causes you to go feral, this is what you do. And lastly – you get a *dark heart* when you give into the compulsion. Dark hearts can be traded in for extra die on rolls; I'm certain you understand why that could be useful. Anything that gives you an excuse to be monstrous in a game about playing monsters is probably a good thing. What's the list? ![[Wicked Ones Dark Impulses.png]] I'm pretty sure you know where this goes, too. > *Cruel:* You enjoy the pain and misery of others, going out of your way to make sure they experience it. Simply killing isn’t enough - that tends to be an end to the cruelty. But the face of someone watching those they care about die? That’s perfect. The pain of others helps you justify your own wretched existence. What kind of a snakeman necromancer would I be if I weren't cruel? I suppose I could be a vengeful snake man necromancer and that would be perfectly fine, too. But that's not what we're doing. Since we've chosen a dark impulse, we also get a dark heart. Just the one. We can have a maximum of two at any given time. **Dark Heart:** 1 #### Choose Revelry Just as in **Blades in the Dark**, characters in **Wicked Ones** have a way of actually blowing off all that stress that they generate in their day to day. This can, of course, end horribly poorly for everyone around, which is the way we want it. ![[Wicked Ones Revelries.png]] If I'm going for truly classic – and why wouldn't I? – clearly Slander's revelry is Occult. Whenever he gets the opportunity he's tinkering with necromantic knowledge that shouldn't be known by anyone, living or dead. I mean, how could that possibly go wrong? #### Choose Gear, Supply, and Gear Defense We get four items as our gear, the stuff that's always on us, and figure out our gear defense. Then another three items which are in our supply back in the dungeon or in our pack. One of the items can be valuable, that is with an edge or a tier 1 contraption, magic item, or three doses of a potion or concoction. Or we can take one gold. Or we can just fill out our gear later as it comes up. Let's see if there's anything interesting in here… - Obviously our scythe counts as a piece of gear. Not because it's our primary weapon; that's just considered fictional circumstance. Instead, we are going to take it as a valuable tool, which gives us +1 when using it to scare someone. Terror is a tool. Additionally, it's a magic focus. We kind of need it. - We will also take a spellbook bound in the skin of sapient beings. Not just humans; that would be racist. We are an equal opportunity necromancer. - We don't want to be one of those squishy reptilian necromancers so we take a set of armor sculpted from living bone, cuirass and helmet, which acts as our gear defense against wounds. Nobody wants wounds. - Having a certain amount of style, I'll have a black-iron jeweled dagger, as there's never a circumstance in which you don't want to have a knife at hand. No matter who you are. In Supply there is: - A human skull which has been carefully inscribed with symbols of insight and prayers of worship of Vahoona; Slander isn't a worshiper, per se, but he recognizes a kindred soul. - A billowing, encompassing cloak with a hood, because sometimes even when you have your own built-in hood you need to pass as just another downtrodden, underfed peasant. It's dusty black and just a little bit road worn. - A surprisingly delicate set of blades, forceps, spreaders, and other medical tools generally used for vivisection but could be pressed into actually doing some healing if necessary. #### Pick a Vile Friend Suddenly, I feel very called out by this game. Is it recognizing that I'm everyone else's vile friend? In this case, once our "dungeon" is established (I'll come back to that in a little bit), there'll be some monster that we met during the initial setup montage who will be an easy way to connect to the world and can be paid for help, items, information, sexual favors, etc. I'm going to come back to this one because a choice that we're going to make down the road is going to matter a lot. In this won't make sense right here. ### Dungeoneering You can't have a set of monsters without having a place for them. After all, they need a place to live, they need a place to work, they need a thing to desire, they need a glorious purpose! Well – often they do. I had a really subversive thought earlier in the day and this is the right opportunity to put it down. What if we don't have a dungeon? What if we are a group of monsters without a home base, out raiding for joy? Does it bring joy? Of course it does! Then this spooled up.  > [!quote] **The Curse** > A curse upon you! Sorrow fall thick and fast! > Your days have been numbered, each hour your last! > May the land, sea or sky turn to swallow you whole! > And fore'er ne'er forget what you stole Well, that does it. We don't have a dungeon, we don't have a home base, we have a pirate ship! Or several pirate ships! Perhaps even a small flotilla! That's probably a little too ambitious. Let's start with a single pirate ship that we roll around the ocean blue, get stuck into terrible decisions, and make the people of islands and archipelagoes fear properly! I like this idea. It's a good idea. The rules for *Wandering Ones* are on page 348 of the core **Wicked Ones** book. But that's not enough for me, oh no. We are also going to use the *Big Bad Wicked One* rules on page 353 for WO as a solo game. We might as well pile up all the weirdness, right? Absolutely right. #### Big Bad Wicked One Let's start here, because this actually affects a few things regarding our character sheet. ![[Wicked Ones Big Bad Wicked One.png]] ##### Boost Actions | Attribute | Action | d | | ---- | ---- | ---: | | Brains | Scan | 2 | | | Tinker | 0 | | | Trick | 1 | | Muscles | Finesse | 2 | | | Skulk | 0 | | | Smash | 0 | | Guts | Banter | 1 | | | Invoke | 3 | | | Threaten | 3 | Since we got a little extra juice, I boosted up Threaten, Finesse, and gave us an extra point in Trick. Slander is still no kind of hard-core combatant. But at least there's a chance. ##### Boost Abilities This is the big one. An extra ability, two flexibility slots, and we can take core abilities from other callings in there. This could be fun. > *Overload* > > You open yourself to a torrent of power. You take +1d when you go hard with a spell, but you can't resist any consequences from the roll. On a critical, you clear 1 stress. This is another one of those "you knew it was going to happen" sort of things. For sheer ridiculous over the top magical power, it's hard to beat. > *Commander* > > You exert your will to bolster your minions. You can spend stress or a dark heart to give a minion pack +1d on a roll. You also gain a defense against minion failure. Borrowing from the Marauder calling, we will definitely find some uses for this. I promise. You can probably imagine them already. > *Pride* > > You instill a deep sense of yourself into anything you create. When you or someone else rolls a critical using something you crafted, you gain a dark heart. And this from the Crafter calling. We are a necromancer. We raise the dead to serve our twisted purposes. Ergo, we crafted them. Oh yes, let the dark hearts flow. ##### Other Tweakies for Slander We get eight segments on the stress clock, which means we can use spells, rituals, and things that require exerting effort quite a bit more than we could otherwise. There's two downtime actions during each lurking phase which, thanks to deciding to go to Wandering Ones, means we get to true downtime actions during both short and long downtimes, which will help out a lot. We can control up to three minion packs and start with one. I see a pirate crew! They also go on raids without requiring gold and that's all right. Finally, we roll twice as much loot is normal and can hold up to five gold. Again, this is going to come in very, very handy with all the pirate raiding. Plus there's the option of sending the minions out on raids and just simulating them with random rolls, which is extremely amusing to consider. ### Theme I think we've got it. We are pirates on the high seas. We raid the poor bastards on land! I think we've got it. ### Atmospherics There's a set of questions which are probably really good to answer about what we're doing here. It's just going to sound very strange once we start answering them. #### What does the dungeons entrance look like from the outside? It is a heavy, dark ship made out of black ironwood, sporting three masts each with a dull silver sail. On the main sail is a faintly green-glowing complex sigil. On the whole, observers can become disquieted by how silent it is. When there is labor to be done, a mix of skeletons and waterlogged corpses can be seen on the decks. #### What are the floors and walls made of? Textured ironwood. There are no polished surfaces at all – except in the captain's quarters which take up more space than might otherwise be allocated as it incorporates an entire necromantic occult laboratory. #### What lights the dungeon and how dark is it? Very little lights the ship outside of the captain's lab; the dead don't need to see much. There are woven light wells on the cargo decks but at night most of the ship is pitch black. #### What sounds and smells greet those who enter? The creaking of wood, the groaning of ropes, the rubbing of one part on another in the wind – for the most part those of the only sounds unless there is experimentation underway. The smell, however. The smell! The rot of the sea, the rot of corpses, and a perverse underlying scent of oranges. #### What makes up the piles of treasure in your hoard? The bulk of it can be found in the occult library in the lab: books of sorcery from every nation, every race. Most of them written in Dark Speech, though not all. The cargo decks (which double as dormitories for the undead) have the occasional gold, jewels, or other valuable piled up in a corner, forgotten, unless some elements of trade need to occur. #### Choose Imps Normally you would have some sort of low-level living thing doing the grunt work in your dungeon. But we aren't in a dungeon. Still, we have imps… They're just not imps. They still get to traits to help describe them. Truly mindless skeletal undead make up the bulk of the crew, hauling ropes, turning capstans, repairing the hull. They are *silent*, *mindless* reminders of who commands this unholy experiment. ### The Pact Since we don't have a classical dungeon, it's replaced by "the pact." The thing binding everyone together in shared purpose. *Piracy, plunder, and death. Plus an unhealthy obsession with exploring necromancy in all of its forms.* Sounds like a good plan. I like it. ### Story Arcs We also need a *story arc* which replaces the traditional master plan. *Slander is looking for another piece to add to his collection and has heard a rumor that it can be found on a small island populated by elves in the southern reaches. Disgusting, filthy elves.* Eventually it would be perfectly reasonable to set up a story arc which involves settling down on an island, isthmus, or peninsula and starting up a proper dungeon. That would make for some really good storytelling. ### Pact Abilities Since we don't have rooms (technically we could but -- stick to the rules, man), we have pact abilities. Battle, Meddling, Mysticism, and Utility. We get to pick one to start with. Mysticism fits our needs, I fear. ### Vile Friend I can't believe that I almost forgot to put in the vile friend! That would've been a terrible shame. Our vile friend is *Bubbles Rainshower*, a mermaid trader whose set up shop almost on the southern edge of the human empire, closely bordering into undead territory. Unlike many of her kind, she has some dark sympathies. Primarily out of a desire to make more profit. Which means that she is happy as a mackerel to get her webbed little hands on products that might have accidentally fallen off a ship into the ocean. Certainly they were acquired entirely aboveboard. No funny business. Certainly no piracy. Nope, never happened. ### Minion Pack We get a free minion pack because we are playing in Big Bad mode! I almost forgot that, too! There is a certain amount of character generation necessary for putting together minion packs because they are characters in their own right, even if they're not individual characters. These fine fellows are going to be a slightly smarter brand of skeletal minion. Smart enough to have a little bit of individuality, a hint of autonomy, and a definite air of menace. They bust heads, stab guts, slice throats, and generally work as Slander's hard agents in the world. When these five bony boys roll up on you, it's probably a good idea to consider your options for evacuation. Their job is *cutthroats*, as entirely appropriate. They do have Actions because otherwise how good at cutting throats could they possibly be? | Attribute | Action | d | | ---- | ---- | ---: | | Brains | Scan | 0 | | | Tinker | 0 | | | Trick | 0 | | Muscles | Finesse | 0 | | | Skulk | 1 | | | Smash | 2 | | Guts | Banter | 0 | | | Invoke | 0 | | | Threaten | 1 | Not particularly good that being perceptive but hitting things very hard and hiding in the shadows? It's a positive talent. These fine fellows also need a dark impulse to distract them. We'll go for *aggressive* because they are neither patient nor mindful enough to desire anything more than mayhem. We won't be putting any upgrades on them at the moment, though certainly doing so later with gold would be a great idea. They aren't particularly capable of long-term endurance but since Slander can summon them fairly cheaply during downtime, they don't really have to be. ### Sandbox and Factions We could sit down with a map of an archipelago and island chain, work out specific locations for factions, and do all the rest of the fun map stuff. But I'm no kind of artist. Actually, that's not true. I'm a *bad* artist. That's a kind of artist. As such, we're just going to talk about the basic *idea* of the map. If I ever get around to actually running or playing this, it could be a very different story. I'm imagining something like the Philippine island chain, off the coast of a much larger continental body which is mainly only important for its shoreline. Plenty of juicy locations, arcane sites, and temples to raid for guts, glory, and occult education! Elves and humans represent the tier 4 factions, the big deal, the head honchos. The elves tend to live on the continental shore to the west and islands to the south while the humans inhabit most of the island chain proper. Both are light factions and both hate each other and are effectively in a constant low-level state of warfare. The rest of the factions aren't quite as geographically easily divided. Hundreds of years of fighting, taking islands, losing islands, and moving around make the borders very blurry. Thankfully, the undead have a significant presence as a tier 3 faction, largely along old battle lines between the human and elven forces. For the most part they aren't oceangoing, preferring to simply go about their inscrutable business on their own. The orcs are a different thing altogether. The largest group of them hold a solid fistful of islands in the southeast and are avowedly aggressive and dark. A splinter faction is attempting to push south against the elven island inhabitants – and are best described as neutral. This confuses both the humans and the elves, not to mention their more aggressive brethren to the east. There are scattered merman outposts which come down from the north, heavily interested in trade with the human empire. They often get it, sharing light philosophies. I'll leave further detail for the future, if the future ever comes. I think it's time to put it all together. ## Character Sheet ![[Slander, Wicked Ones.png]] ![[Slander, Slissik Necromancer Pirate.png]] > *Overload* > > You open yourself to a torrent of power. You take +1d when you go hard with a spell, but you can't resist any consequences from the roll. On a critical, you clear 1 stress. > *Commander* > > You exert your will to bolster your minions. You can spend stress or a dark heart to give a minion pack +1d on a roll. You also gain a defense against minion failure. > *Pride* > > You instill a deep sense of yourself into anything you create. When you or someone else rolls a critical using something you crafted, you gain a dark heart. ## Exunt This took a lot longer than I thought it was going to, not the least reason being that the Big Bad rules are pretty straightforward changes but the Wandering Ones mechanics are much less thought out and integrated, and trying to do them both at once is kind of a mess. Going for a more traditional dungeon-oriented Wicked Ones game would probably be a lot less work in a lot more straightforward. But who can resist necromancers on the high seas? I can't! I'm looking forward to next month when the **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** expansion **[Sundered Isles](https://twitter.com/ShawnTomkin/status/1531680277344362498)** which promises to cover seafaring ships, fleets, and adventure sees Kickstarter time. In the meantime, we have this and something else that we will probably be returning to sooner or later when it comes to **Wicked Ones**, **[[Wicked Ones#Undead Adventures|Undead Adventures]]**, which turns the volume up very aggressively. But until then watch for the silver sails! Out.