Five Weighty Spells

Palimpsest Pack
Load yourself to your limit with bags and goods and cast this spell. The pack will disappear into the luminous aether and return whenever you call it, requiring a turn to materialize.  You can cast the spell multiple times (one pack per level).  Wear a normal pack as well and carry all the comforts with you into the wild.

Baba's Ox
Cut the ox's throat and cast this spell before the last drop of blood drains from it.  It will pull loads silently while needing no water, no food, no rest, and no sleep, for as many days as you are powerful (level).  Peasants consider this evil.

My Pretties
Cry "Take These!" to call small creatures forth (1d6 per level) which will each take a few items from you (up to 7.5 pounds) and then scatter back into the landscape.  Cry "My Pretties!" to call them back and retrieve your items.  These creatures-- monkeys, opossums, raccoons, bats, rats, cats, anything that can grasp or bite-- will shadow you along your path as quiet as their kind, until called again.

Burdensome Kiss
Cast the spell and kiss someone within an hour.  That person will then feel the weight of all you bear for a week.  They will also know what you did.

Gold adds Light to the Air
A solid gold model of an object is made and the spell cast on it.  The original, will be light as a coin and perfectly balanced.  Hide the golden model somewhere safe.

Wilderness Travel Mini-Games VII

For those of you just joining this series, I realized that the default for travel in the wilderness is usually-- nothing happens-- and that there was little to differentiate traveling through one type of terrain from another.  So I set out to try and create strategic games to both, give players something to do while travelling, and to make travelling through the desert feel different than travelling through the jungle.

Because I don't have any typical images in my head for travel through the luminous aether, I made this one a little more abstract.  Also, I don't have any experience DMing folks through planar journeys, but I imagine this could be modifiable to lots of different applications-- travelling through dreams or psionically, for example.  For that reason, though, I have no idea what unit to use here, whether it be time, space, or number of planes jumped.  I leave you to figure out the particulars.  Here we go:

The character that initiated the travel begins in the center.  The rest of the travellers are arranged around the initiator concentrically.

Every unit of travel each traveller must move one position as they are jostled about in the aether.  Before moving each player rolls a d6.  The position they can move to can only be their die roll or lower.  Only one player can occupy a spot at a time. 

If a player rolls lower than all adjacent spaces they must move to the lowest space next to them.  If a player on a 2 spot rolls a one or has adjacent spots blocked, they slip into the void.

Once a journey, players with exceptional intelligence can add their bonus to any persons die roll.

If the party is attacked while travelling, characters receive penalties to combat depending on which ring they have been jostled to: the three spots are -1, and the two spots are -2.  A player lucky enough to be on the six spot receives +1 to combat that round.
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So, it isn't too likely for someone to get jostled off unless the party travelling is large and starts blocking each other.  But with the penalties to combat, players will still want to stay as close to the center as possible.

What does slipping into the void mean?  Seems like a pretty good adventure hook to me, probably they end up in a plane they least expected.  What happens if the initiator of travel slips off?  Ooh, seems like they'd take everyone with them, don't you think?

Beasts of Burden

   So I went back and added spots for name and owner as you can see. The checkboxes are for hitpoints. You darken the outlines of all the hitpoints a particular animal has. There was some variation between rule sets so I just put down 24 for mules and camels. That's enough for 3 eight sided hit dice and you can use less if your ruleset uses d6 hd or whatever. In combat you pencil off checkboxes as they take damage.  You could even put little asterisks or colored marks between boxes to flag when an animal would try to flee or go berserk (thanks to Carjacked Seraphim Jim for that idea).

   Here is an elephant with a mahout and howdah meant for tiger hunting. I couldn't find any pictures of elephants straight up carrying loads. It seems there were either used for transport like this or bulldozers moving logs around with their tusks.  So I'm not sure what to do with them.  I have some ideas-- maybe put silhouettes for how many armored adults they can carry, or insets that will blow up to full cargo sheets of 450 lbs each.

   But I'm not sure how much Indian elephants can carry.  Such a simple range to want to find and so hard to find online.  Same with gorillas, I saw that they were anywhere from 6 to 13 times as strong as a man.  That's arm strength though, doesn't mean you could even fit all that weight on their back.  I'm thinking they might only be capable of carrying a smaller pack, something closer to the mule, but come with the extra capabilities of opening doors and bending iron bars like a beast.

   If you have suggestions of carrying capacity for different creatures, or know a place that has them let me know.  I keep looking at the AD&D Wilderness Survival guide, but they gave 500 pounds for a mule which made me doubt their judgement (some mules could do that, but I think the average mule was smaller).  How about dinosaurs or mythical creatures?

   Oh, and the elephant has enough boxes for 10.5 eight-sided hitdice.  If that isn't enough for a particular ruleset let me know, but I wanted it to look aesthetically pleasing too.
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   Late night addition: It's pretty cool learning how these different animals are good at different things maybe this is the first step to having these kinds of creatures more real in my world.  For example, llamas carry less than all the others but eat less and are even better than mules on treacherous terrain.  They are fine in the cold too.

   I'm not really happy with the llama's silhouette, but that's the best I could do after hours of looking.  Only 10 slots here which gives you ~75 pounds.  Again, bigger individuals could probably carry more, but we're shooting for an average to take extra rough trails into account, etc.  Not sure how many hit points they'd have.  I just left the mule's checkboxes because they are symmetrical.

Simple Pack Camel

Here's an attempt at a simple list based encumbrance for dromedary camels.  With 55 slots that are roughly 7.5 pounds you get a little over 400 pounds.  This is an average-- bigger camels would carry more and most camels might carry more but for limited distances.

I like that is sort of in scale with the mules.  Players should easily see that the camel can carry more.  This will be harder to continue if we get a creature that needs more than a page for all its slots.  I suppose I could do two sides of the page or something.

With the slots divided up into groups, players with lots of beasts of burden won't have to track every little thing, they could just have certain supplies in chests or bags that are kept track of and put on the beasts loaded, pretty much like a real expedition would.

Simple Pack Mules

I've had this in mind for a while and had some time to sit down and make it today.  The idea uses list based encumbrance.  Players write down things they store on the mule and once all the slots are filled the mule can't carry any more.   I had to look back at my old encumbrance post to see that I settled on 7.5 pounds per slot-- a mid point between heavy weapons and lighter daggers.  That means with 26 slots per mule they can hold ~195 pounds which is about right.  You can assume 5-10 pounds for a pack saddle and harness etc.

I've long wanted to standardize how much sacks, bags, and chests can hold in my game.  See The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms for some recent posts on this.  If I do that, I can not only tell players how many coins they can stuff in a sack but know ahead of time how many slots a full sack would take up.  (This is probably amusing to folks good at calculating in their heads, but I figure it will help players visualize their choices too).

I think I've been saying 30lbs of coins in a sack, so that would mean 4 slots and ol' Henry here could carry 6 and a half sacks of coins.  Or, if you are using 10 coins to the pound, 1950 coins.

I want to do this for camels and dog sleds and maybe weird stuff like gorillas too.  Also, it would probably be helpful to have a visual key showing how much various container can hold.  I think for simplicity's sake I will make the slots they hold equivalent to the slots they contain.  That way you can just toss your bags on the mule, or tie on a chest without worrying what the chest weighs.

I'm just realizing it would probably be good to put a line for names and characteristics of different mules and maybe even simple meters for wounds or exhaustion.