The files for Bloodring remain as unencumbered as I can make them, but if you’re willing to download them from itch.io instead, it’ll make the number go up.
Recovered: Bloodring
A natural consequence of bad ideas. My entry in the Into the Odd PocketMod Jam (2019). CW: slavery, combat as sport.
Motivation
- Make gladiatorial combat interesting in a game where combat is best avoided.
- Provide an opportunity for things to get worse.
- Create something useful within the given constraints (time, form factor).
Notes
- Amounts of money are rough. Pay should be enough to motivate free gladiators, but not so much that slaves are freed too quickly.
- After first blood, combat is assumed to take turns.
- Mutilations are meant to give combat consequences between “death” and “recovery”. They also convey the passage of time on days when PCs do not fight.
- Making more gladiators is easy: For captive gladiators I used 3d6. For free gladiators I used 4d6 drop lowest. For simplicity everyone starts with 1d6 HP and no mutilations.
- As a starting point for adventure it still feels lacking to me because it doesn’t provide many motivations of its own and takes away a lot of the PCs’ toys.
- Combat should be survivable enough that characters don’t necessarily die, but unpleasant enough that PCs consider escape or revolt or other things preferable.
- Consider gambits from Moonhop or extra HP from Electric Bastionland (under “Scars”).
Learnings
- The booklet was written in LibreOffice with an A7 paper size. It’s apparently quite difficult to do N-up printing without a margin, so I ended up using PDFResizer.com. Had I time, I would like to use PDFjam.
- The PocketMod format really forces an economy of words. I found myself writing sentences that were barely intelligible in other contexts.
- The cover image is Piranesi. The Wound Man is Ambroise Paré.
- Printing on US letter paper, I found printing at 98% was the largest I could get before I lost things to the margins. This is why all my PocketMods are slightly off-kilter. The reasonable thing to do would be to print them all with outlines and then trim the paper to size, but that’s work. Or find a printer that goes to the edges.
Files
- bloodring-A7.pdf - for viewing on a screen.
- bloodring-A4.pdf - for printing on A4 paper.
- bloodring-US.pdf - for printing on US letter paper.
- bloodring-A7.odt - for editing
This post was first shared on February 22, 2019.There is little evidence from the 2019 Into the Odd PocketMod Jam, but I remain grateful to Rattlemayne for organizing it. Only one other entry was ever shared outside the Discord server, and it’s very cool: The Pominomicon!