Recovered: A Pair of Failed Careers
Into the Odd is my one-shot game of choice. It has just enough of everything. Just enough mechanics, just enough character, just enough world. I understand where Electric Bastionland is coming from, but it’s always seemed like the “just a little too much” counterpart for my purposes. That said, the failed careers are elegant little thought-forms, similar to Troika! backgrounds, and I had some fun putting these two on paper.
Courier
You took things places.
Collaged from public domain sources.
Sample Names
Major, Fries, Tate, Owney
You Get
Uniform, Letter Opener (d6, concealable)
| Cash | What stopped you? |
|---|---|
| £1 | Snow. Take a heavy down coat (Armor 1, Bulky). |
| £2 | Rain. Take rubberized boots. |
| £3 | Heat. Take a light metal water bottle. |
| £4 | Gloom of night. Take a lantern. |
| £5 | Forgery. Take a jeweler’s loupe. |
| £6 | Honor. Take one letter, unopened, undeliverable. |
| HP | What were you good at? |
|---|---|
| 1 | First-class mail. Test Wil to turn dogs. |
| 2 | Special deliveries. Take one bicycle. You can outrace anyone on a paved street, but cannot stop or notice anything along the way. |
| 3 | Packaging. Never break a fragile object. |
| 4 | Routing. For any address know the name of someone who has lived there or lives there now. |
| 5 | Labelling. Immediately and accurately know the weight of anything held in one hand. |
| 6 | Paper routes. Always know this morning’s headlines. |
If you are the youngest player,
the whole group is 10k in debt to the vagrant’s HOA. You technically can’t sleep on the streets.
Burnboss
If you don’t set small fires, the big ones will rage uncontrollably.
Charles M. Quinlan, Public Domain
Sample Names
Morgan, Smollex, Danver, Kangg
You Get
Shovel, Hatchet (d6)
| Cash | How’d you get out of the game? |
|---|---|
| £1 | Deregulation. Take a directory of your competitors (d4). |
| £2 | Technical arson. Take an expired license. |
| £3 | Backdraft. Take no hair. |
| £4 | Antidrought. It is still raining when the game starts, wherever you were licensed. |
| £5 | Aggressive noncompete. Other crews will not talk to you. |
| £6 | Burncrew mutiny. Take one gilt-edged page from a holy book, a hole burned thru the center. |
| HP | How did you start fires? |
|---|---|
| 1 | Flamethrower. Take one (d6, Blast, Bulky). |
| 2 | Ritual duel. Take one flint sword (d8, sparks against steel). |
| 3 | Pyrokinesis. Test Wil to ignite any dry material, once/day. |
| 4 | Advanced optics. Take one magnifying glass. |
| 5 | Alchemy. Take three firebombs (d6 Damage each round until extinguished). |
| 6 | The old-fashioned way. Take one fancy lighter. You can do tricks with it. |
If you are the youngest player,
the whole group is 10k in debt to Hurly & Sons Insurance Insurance Insurance. Collateral damage incurred is not added to your debt.
This post was first shared on December 14, 2021. At the time it had primitive art from Wombo, which we would now call “AI.” I still think there was a certain charm to those early models, where you could see the machine struggling to interpret a prompt and sometimes reaching to unexpected places. Still, I replaced it with public domain images, which honestly didn’t take much longer to source and I think more clearly communicate. The burnboss was inspired by a real career that I thought was fascinating, and took the idea of transplanting to an urban environment.