Trauma Conquering System for dealing with sanity in an elf game

This is a refresh of a post I previously made. I’m trying to make it simple to adjudicate.

A ghost touches your soul. An elder evil's face is glimpsed. Your whole family dies. So you had a bad day, and now you are not in your right mind.

When you fail to save vs insanity, take a condition. While you have a condition, you cannot gain XP, though exorcising your inner demons may come with a cathartic XP bonus. The good news is you cannot gain more than one condition at a time.

All the conditions' mechanical effects and XP nullification will go away once their requirements have been satisfied, but these should prompt lingering role-playing issues. You were broken, and like a kintsugi bowl, you will beautiful, but never the same.

One rule: Give these in secret to your players. They should keep their insanity secrect (act, it's a freakin RPG) and their motives mysterious.

1d12 Broken PC Conditions:

1. WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?!†: You're certain that a random ally or NPC has a secret, and you must find it out by any means necessary (the secret doesn't have to be true, but your character must be satisfied with the confession).
   • I hate the smell of honey, don't you? Anyways, best tell me where you hid the baby.
   • If you don't admit right now, by Mitra, what is in your pocket, I will drop this puppy.
   • This is potent wine, isn't it? You might slip and let me know anything and I would never tell a soul!
   
   
2. HIDE YOUR SOUL!: You must change your current, true name (use ceremonial methods) and hide it in a Matryoshka doll in a box in a chest within the pits of ______ (the DM can decide how to get you the name of the place).
   
   
3. I NEED TO TAKE HIM DOWN A PEG: You must secretly or suddenly set up a situation harmful to an NPC. This should expose them to significant loss of reputation. Tripping a guy in the street is not enough; you need this person to be shunned by their peers. If they get jailed or killed, well, they deserved it, right?!
   • Lady Chattery's brooch is missing? What is that dangling from Lord Tashertorn's boot?
   • Ha, little does the acolyte know that I gave him a scroll of explosive runes to take back to Sandelstin the Imperious.
   
   
4. I NEED THE POWER AND CONTROL: You must gain an office or station with sway over no less than 10×level sapient beings.
   • Some of you may die, but that is a risk I am willing to take.
   • I have received a revelation, and have been directed to marry all three sisters, brother Hyrum. As the humble representative of Xenu, I must obey.
   • Too long have orcs lived in the shadows!
   
   
5. PUZZLES ARE THE KEY TO REALITY: You have to solve one adventure puzzle or riddle on your own. If anyone tries to help you, not only is the chance to end this condition ruined, but you also have the Resentment condition (3) from above towards that character too!
   • Shut up, I know how knights move on the board!
   • All these squares make a circle...
   
   
6. MONSTERPHILIA: you have to woo one monster. Consummate the relationship somehow before regaining your wits. Oh lord, I hope your game has safety tools.
   • I roll to seduce the dragon.
   
   
7. GOLDFEVER: You need to collect at least 100 gold coins (no sharing!), then roll a (DC 15-1 for every 100 gold hoarded since you got unwell) Will save, or you still have this condition.
   • I need, like enough to swim in.
   
   
8. CRAVENNESS: Hire a body guard and cower during fights as long as the body guard lives. After they die, you reluctantly start taking care of business again.
   • Brave, brave sir Robin! You tell them, my henchman.
   
   
9. MY OATH WILL KEEP ME PURE: Chose a quest/mission/objective you have yet to fulfill (even if it is a really old one you kinda forgot), or throw yourself at the mercy of the DM and they will make up one for you. If possible, drop any other current objectives and single-mindedly pursue that one to completion.
   • I will not rest until the level one goblin chieftain is dead.
   
   
10. FAY-PRIMITIVISM: You abhor worked metal of any kind, and seize up with imagined allergic reactions at the touch of such. This condition ends once a foe has pierced you with such an implement and you survive.
    • It burnses us!
    
    
11. WATCH THE WORLD BURN: You must set some structures (occupants quite optional) ablaze. The amount of floors or burned structures must equal or exceed your current level.
    • Warms the soul.
    • Anyone know where I could get a fiddle?
    
    
12. I NEED A TOME TO HELP ME MAKE MY CREEPY NOTEBOOK: You become obsessed with finding esoteric information (of your choice) that you are convinced is to be found in the tome of ____ and won't be sane until you have studied it for a number of weeks numbering (roll until you roll under your Int). You must do some research to find the name of the tome, as well as clues to where it might be.  

†: This one is almost directly ripped from a False Machine post that started this idea for me.
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here's one I rejected for not being questy enough and overlong:
Body issues: You must (1d3) 1: loose 1d20 pounds, 2: gain 1d20 pounds of fat, or 3: gain 1d10 pounds of muscle. It will take 1 day of fasting to lose any 1 pound (roll over Con to confirm), and 1 week to gain any (roll under Str or Con to confirm). If you lose or gain fat, also lose or gain a point of Con when you reach your goal weight. If you gain the muscle, gain a point of Str, but you must eat double rations to maintain your body image/gained score.
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[MAP] Tomb of Horrors for DCC funnel play and beyond

Green devil nipples ahoy! Click that map to embiggen even more. All the $ signs are for secret doors, and they tend to point to where they are with their bottom stroke.

When you click this, it is gonna take you to a huuuuugely detailed file file.

First, have another map. I know. I make a lot of these and they are kinda my proud moments. 

This time, it is a North to South reversed take on the infamous Tomb of Horrors. I ran some dudebros' DCC zeros through there, and the results were very fun. I noted the upside down compass rose all over the place to remind myself, because Uncle Gygax's description used cardinal directions a lot, but it turns out that I can pretty much run the place from memory/ad libs (improvisational changes happened because I wanted to change it quite a bit and when I map out an area I can't help but change a few things). 

I'll detail the changes and tell what happened when we ran zeros through a dungeon Gary made for high level characters. A few people asked me, when I advertised the game on Discord, "How can you have level zero people do that place?" The answer is it's super easy, barely an inconvenience. We are dealing with role-players here, people that solve impossible problems every session. Sure, a lot of them died along the way, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Area (1): This was one of the false entrances, but I've modified the original module ones and added a few extra ones.  The players eventually explored them all. (1) was hit on a secondary outing from the town. The town was inspired by Return to the Tomb of Horrors, a TSR publication that expanded ToH into a second dungeon and added a death cult city to the tomb.

That's what the "Macrabre Misfits" part of the map refers to. The PCs are from that town, and some players really relished the role of fatalist PCs. Anyhoo, room (1). If the lever is messed with while no one is on the flushly-raised-with-the-floor, helical stairwell, it doesn't budge. If someone is standing on the stairs, the lever can be operated by someone else and the stairs will lower... very swiftly and hundreds of feet down into hellfire. Yeah, hell is under the tomb and red devils in hardhats work here.

The devils were relatively friendly in a water-cooler shlub kind of way, but not at all on the players' side. One was convinced to give some hints in order to get a PC to put in a good word with the PC's goat (devils dig the goat horns). But the devils actually have clipboards with information on how things work with special notes to give to the PCs sometimes. The notes are lies. The devils are evil after all, and PCs are like bothersome rats messing up a dungeon that the devils will have to clean and fix it again.

So here are the other false entrances. You may recognize the sliding rock one (2), which is modded with death flames for people that are insistent on messing with those knockers on the green devil's knockers.

The pincher: I ended up putting a couple daises with hand-prints on them at the two east-west ends of the room. Nothing happens if just one is pinched. Two PCs work together to put their hands on the two prints, the devil faces slide closed in a macabre make-out session, and the PCs are trapped inside until they die of hunger. Actually, if I run this again, I think I will make the kissing devils steam up the room, steaming trapped PCs to death.

I don't need to explain the rocks fall room, right?

During the first trip into the tomb, the PCs threw rocks at this statue, a god of death effigy. Some devils taking a lunch break on top of the tomb leaned over and yelled at the PCs about that. Was a good way to introduce the devils. Later an old lady made a Japanese style pilgrimage to the statue (clap and pray). She gave the PCs some advice. She was a death cultist, so it was bad advice.

So this is the actual entrance. Of note is that I put a P where the door painting is. I put PT symbols to remind me to see if PCs trigger a pit-trap as they are walking through. Since I didn't want to worry about exactly where the PCs are stepping (in the original, the path means almost nothing), I just had quantum pit traps here. The PCs detected almost all of them with guile and goats. What I did have the path do was be a Morse-code so the smartest PCs get the poem that gives vital clues to keep them getting deeper and deader into the tomb.

But before we jump through that portal, lets talk of the catoblepas. This loathsome beast wanders the swamp. PCs that walked up to it made a save. Failing would spell death (all my players were lucky), but passing the save still gave spooky glimpses of horrible deaths possible in the tomb. Nobody died in the way foretold. Doesn't matter. Was a great mood setter.

This is the place the PCs tried before they learned to love the portal. The monster was not a "mutant gargoyle" but a four armed, winged, snake demon frozen in temporal stasis till a PC opened a door. It killed many people. I forgot to mention it's necklace to the players at first, and went back and re-illustrated it. DON'T FORGET THE NECKLACE!

Okay, so once the party finally got through the portal, the entered (11) (statue room, nothing to do at first because I forgot to mention the necklace) and then the hall of spheres. I hate the name because it sounds like "spears" and we have players from around the world so we really have to take pains to use clear language. And besides, there are spear traps in the original module. Also, heck, how can you use the word sphere for a 2D image. That's a circle, man. So, to avoid at least one aspect of that confusion, I changed the spear-trap doors to the ant trap and gas trap. The gas gives super-plague buboes within moments of inhalation, and the super army ants can eat a henchman in 10 seconds flat. Both were triggered.

One thing to note about the secret but necessary passage that leads to the cathedral is I switched the entrance side to the other wall of the hall. It's pretty annoying to work around passages that go under other areas when you are using a virtual tabletop and fog of war. I added a pit that was bottomless and one detour loop too. Players did not really go for either, sensing rightly that it would be bad for them. There was a hand-print dais here, and the PCs wisely did not touch it.

Adding fun green devil bits was very fun for me. The players encountered this green devil ass and wisely chose to shove a whole cheese wheel up it. This brilliant move saved them from the fear gas. They killed the false lich shortly thereafter.

  a sarlacc pit, basically

I asked the players to just role-play the effects of the idiot gas here. I didn't ask for saves. They role played the heck out of this and raced to fulfill the sea-devil's demand. I was so proud of them. One sacrifice later and we had the PCs transferred to (25) as a reward. You may note the OG module's siren is missing. I relocated her to the room of despair.

(25) is where the tale ends for our adventurers, because a PC, still under the effects of idiot gas perhaps, made a wish with the monekey's paw diamond it turned the party into a bunch of atomic bees doing a plank-length vigil over the tomb's true treasure. Was a bit of a shame; I wanted them to experience the doors bleeding like The Shining's elevator. Ah well, I'll probably run it in a few years again.

Speaking of which, if you want to join any of the games on my discord, email me at claytonian at the gmail.coms and I'll send you an invite. This is what I currently run:
Carcosa 

Tokyo, Japan Weds at 08:00 JST
New York, USA Tues at 19:00 EDT
London, United K Weds at 00:00 BST
Los Angeles, USA Tues at 16:00 PDT

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The Party Actual Play Report

A while back, I made the game The Party, which is basically a list of odd characters and one paragraph of rules. If I do say so myself, it's the ultimate pick up and play TRPG. We've played it a couple times now, and I'm here to tell you how the latest session went.

We played a version of Night of the Walking Wet. Here, have the map I drew for the overland. Then scroll down to the report below it.

To do things, roll a d20 and the GM will roll one too. If it seems to be something you would be better at than other classes would be—exempli gratia, a warrior rolling to hit—you can roll a d30 instead. If you roll higher, you do the thing. If the GM die rolls close to yours though, maybe you didn’t do the thing so smoothly. If you failed, there is some bad thing that happens now and makes sense for the danger you have blundered your way into.

That's pretty much all the rules up there. So we started with a thief that poses as a blind umbrella salesman (we've rolled this result in a past session so I tweeked it, and thru play the PC became more exotic-umbellateer than thief), an Amazon out to find the dragon that razed her village, and an eye-mage (they were a leprechaun, but that didn't come up). I had the players roll d30s on the char-gen table because I felt like having an odd session.

They proceeded south in hopes of selling umbrellas to Thracian goat herders (this map goes all in on Judges Guild stuff), but soon became distracted by the sight of a dragon soaring in the sky. Eye mage decides to try to obscure vision of the dragon. This is definitely an eye-magey thing to do, so I grant them a d30 and roll a d20 for the opposition. We both get natural ones! The mage attracts the dragon's attention, but is hit out of nowhere by a rogue UFO. Maybe I shoulda had more consequence for the mage than that, but oh well.

So the players track down where the dragon crashed and finish it off with an umbrella up the intestines. Too bad, because from the looks of it, that dragon was the brother of the dragon the amazon was looking for. They start harvesting organs, so I ask if they have a clever way to preserve them long enough to get to someone who can actually afford it (Startsville has a poor economy since the lands to the south got full of zombies and odd humanoids about a hundred years back, when the "comet" crashed). Well, I have jars of piss (ammonia) says one player. We roll to see if they are big enough, and they roll high, so yes, yes they do have those jars.

The players also decided to scope out the karst believed to be the dragon's lair. Turns out the roost is like sixty feet down a cliff. Umbrella dude is like, "No prob, just take one umbrella in each hand and float down, friends." Others are like, "After you." Natural 1. Splat!

So that player rolls up a dwarf into rune-priestcraft and is encountered by the other PCs as they are back in town to hawk piss-pickled dragon organs. Okay, long story short, dragon blood is harvested too, magical research (think carousing table) is undertaken, and a little stone dragon familiar joins the priest. Slime missionaries try to convert the party with paper-airplane flyers. Das PCs end the session by fumbling their journey roll and thus cornered on the karsk by a small army of weird humanoid monsters, who they shake off by creating a rune-earthquake and giving lots of pinkeye to.

So yeah, good game and fun system. If you want the character table, go here. The only revision I've really done to the rules is to emphasize that natural 20s can beat higher numbers than 20 on the opposing die.
 
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Flower Liches Fan Map, Biches

Yes the typo was intentional.

If you have +Kabuki Kaiser's Flower Liches, this map may help you. Disclaimer: I only had access to a draft of the dungeon, and haven't bought the final. Take note of the secret passage, as that is not on the maps!
One version is full-color, and both are with a subtle hint about the secret passage. Be sure to click till you can't zoom no more (right click, view image, and really see details), and check out my fan-maps tag for some more crazy maps, like Deep Carbon.

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Fan Maps Collection 1

So here are a few maps I've done over the years for other people's dungeons. Click on each to visit its original post and see some larger image options as well as ideas for how to run the dungeon.

Death Frost Doom

Damn, I wish I had signed this one; it has been spread all over the net. Have not checked if it is still viable for the Zack S. refurbished edition. No offense to him, but I'll stick to my flautist anyways.

Bone Hoard of the Dancing Horror

This one got retroactively accepted into the module

Silent Nightfall

Prolly my worst one, but useful stats for murder owls

Deep Carbon Observatory

Wondering what I should tackle next.
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Deep Carbon Observatory Map (fan-map)

Deep Carbon Fan map. Click to zoom. Then view it in its own tab and you can zoom waaaay in, Morty.

 Here is my take on the #DeepCarbonObservatory map. Looks like Dr. Seuss drew the Grinch Meets the Underdark.

I hope it helps make things clear, but some things, such as the first room, had wonky dimensions and unknown numbers of statues, so this is just my take on it. It works really well on roll20; lots of zoom in power here.

Deep Carbon Observatory is that thing by +Patrick Stuart​​.

I really recommend the groundhog day approach to run the first part of this adventure (the town and dam).

I've decided the funnest way to run the beginning of Deep Carbon Observatory, with its Sophia's Choice chain, is as a Groundhog's day infinite loop scenario. An early report I wrote on it:

Now the party is making different choices and seeing different consequences. They're on their second loop, and have already seen the butterfly effect. They're about to unwittingly hit the time trigger again...

 
 One of the wizards in the wizard duel uses his stick of do-over each time he loses the duel (the party ignored them the first time). It creates a large sphere, and anyone caught in the sphere has their mind sent back in time to the start of the adventure, when the party was coming in via a ferry. The ferryman also remembers what happened. As does the artful dodger Wit. Nobody has figured out the trigger yet; they think the Oracular God has cursed them.

Also, at least some of the Crows experienced it too. I let the party catch a glimpse of the crazy dwarf just before the blast.

I considered having the time trick actually belong to the crows. Like they have an item that lets them have a do-over provided they feed it a soul it has never supped before. It still could be... in either case, it will have a drawback if the players manage to nab it...

It was a fun way to let the Crows terrorize them a bit. My player assumed the time gimmick was the main thing Deep Carbon was known for until I admitted the truth.


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Silent Nightfall Fan Map

Purple Duck is one of the longest standing 3rdP companies for DCCRPG. This map is for their adventure Silent Nightfall. The stats on the map are for ease of use when running on a virtual tabletop with fog of war, but will be kinda useless without the adventure itself explaining what the special abilities of the monsters are. I added a little color to emphasize some things, like the whispering stone.

Though there are some differences to the room descriptions as written (because I went all isomorphic and moved things around to keep my sanity), if the management wants to use this map in any way, they can! Turns out the last fan map I made for them made it into the latest update of the module.

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Fan Map for Bone Hoard of the Dancing Horror

Want to run Bone Hoard in style?
This map is meant to address a couple things that dumb game judges like me can benefit from. It shows a couple monsters near where they might be encountered (just out of site of fog of war if you are using Roll20), including the heretofore unillustrated [in the original module] dancing horror itself.  The hordling is near a room where the adventure suggests it make itself known. There are a couple of traps illustrated too. I hope it enhances your experience. Click to embiggen. You might enjoy my fan map for Death Frost Doom too.

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Death Frost Doom Isometric Map

I shared this a while back in the G+ community for LotFP, but here is an isometric map of DFD, perfect for Roll20. Almost all the rooms are there, just in different places. One set of crypts is in the shape of the evil sign. I think I relocated the evil sign to the door to room 2. Click to embiggen.

As for plot, I still had a plant hanging down blocking the way to the giant skeleton room, but it does not sussurate. Instead, there is an ancient old man that ceaselessly pipes away on a flute in 21. He has an extra flute in his coat and will offer it while still playing. Any player that takes it up is cursed to play until a new flautist comes. The dead get real cranky if their music is turned off.

I made the vampire into a seductress. In my campaign, the PCs for the most part joined her and then she took them with her to be lich kings in the new undead empire.

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