The Quirks in this Substack

A group of mini articles on how Tales of Penumaria will be run.

Feb 07, 2022

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I try to keep these articles in some form of organization, especially with grouping related pieces together like finding a shape among several jigsaw pieces. However, there will be some articles that are little more than a pile of small miscellaneous items stacked together. This is one of those articles.

Item: Indexing

This Substack will have some index articles. You may have already noticed them if you been on the main page and there’s also a link to the Main Index on each of the articles. This Index will be updated with each new article. These indexes will list of all the articles in the Substack, and when the need comes they’ll be subdirectories. Some stories may have their own index article, and they will be set up before the introduction article is posted.

Item: The Schedule

I want to, at the best, post at most two articles a week, alternating between story, setting, and ‘the rest.’ The ‘rest’ being the mechanics, essays explaining my thought processes, backstories on various bits, and other things that are too large to fit into the any footnotes or side bars that will pop up in these articles. That section on the bottom of the article will have small explan-ations of certain items you might not be aware of will be given. Explanations that take up larger text will get their own Article. ‘Story’ articles are exactly what it means, and they will usually appear in 25K word articles. That’s what I’m shooting for as a limit on length. ‘Setting’ is for Worldbuilding, which will include character descriptions, details on locations, stat blocks of monsters, descriptions of magic items, the requisite maps, and so on.

Eventually the adventures will come, as well as more extensive worldbuilding and lore, which will become part of the paid tier. But that’s further down the timeline.

Item: Welcome to the OSR

If you’re looking for organized play like the Adventurer’s League in Penumaria…er, I would say keep looking, but you know what…don’t bother looking. You’ll won’t find it.

Some of you might have heard of the OSR, or Old School Renaissance. It’s a style of play that harkens back to the earlier days of Role-Playing Games where…well…take all you know about how you expect Dungeons & Dragons to be played, how you’d think it’s played because you’ve binge-watched Critical Role…and chuck it out the window.

The OSR is the polar opposite to that.

If you’ve seen Stranger Things or Rick and Morty and you’ve seen the kids in these shows play D&D, that's what OSR play looks like. But I can truly summarize the OSR with two words:

Anything Goes

This is the Whose Line is it Anyway version of Roleplaying, where everything is made up and Jeremy Crawford ain’t around to matter. The books Wizards put out might be iron clad in the Adventurer’s League, but in the OSR, they’re mere suggestions. You can go as fantastic, as imaginative, and as off the rails as you’d like, with only the Storyteller deciding what is allowed or not. Rule decisions are made in real time, on the fly, with as little rulebook referencing as humanly possible, and home rules are not only allowed but encouraged!

Oh, just so you’ll know. The Storyteller is what the Dungeon Master will be called here. It’s necessary: ‘Dungeon Master’ is Product Identity for Wizards of the Coast, and I can’t understand why. You’d think that such evergreen terms like the DM would be allowed to be public domain.

OSR adventures and modules doesn’t deal with just combat; exploration and interaction are also part of the game, and the player characters get XP from them as well. The players are encouraged to keep maps, use strategy, think outside the box and try to outwit and outmaneuver whatever is before them instead of just swinging a sword at everything, and all this is rewarded in an OSR play. Also, when there are some disagreements on the rules or something that needs to be changed, that conflict or change occurs on the table with the players deciding on the rules as they go. It starts with the familiar ground in the OSR, but don’t expect it to stay there.

Some people might find Old School Renaissance play daunting, and even intimidating, especially when you are used to playing with ‘Rules by Written.’ To those people, they’re about to play this game without a proverbial net, and it’s only a matter of time before you stop playing D&D and start playing Calvinball. Fortunately, I know of a primer on how to play a game OSR style on the internet. Here’s a link to the URL so that you can download it and read it yourself: https://tinyurl.com/ysepuyda.

I’m not above using tinyurl.com if a link address is too long to be post-able here.

And while we’re talking about the rules…

Item: Swifttail Fifth Edition

Before you ask, no, you can still use the standard D&D Rulebooks (Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide) as well as all the expansions: (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, Tasha’s Caldron to Everything, and

Penumaria will use a customized fork of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, that I call Swifttail OSR Fifth Edition D&D. Swifttail is something I’ve been working on for several years now, as I made various tweaks to Wizards of the Coast’s rules to make things easier for me. I started with altering the text of the rules—not the rules themselves, just the way they’re written—so that my fifty plus year old eyes can lock into that needed dice roll or modifier or Difficulty Class on the page.

I’m not knocking how Wizards of the Coast wrote them, mind you. They do their job well when they needed someone to comprehend what the rules are. Key word here being, ‘comprehend.’ I need to skim the text to get to a specific item, and that means using a lot of bold and italicized text, at least.

I then expanded the standard rules with my favorite home rules, replaced several mechanics, borrowed pages form previous editions to fill in gaping holes, designed a complete overhaul of the Stat Block and plenty of other changes to make the game less about digging through the rulebooks and more about the reason why you’re on the table: playing the actual game.

You do not need to learn Swifttail all at once right now. In fact, like I said, you can still use the standard rules to play. Swifttail D&D is 99% backwards compatible with the Standard D&D made by Wizards of the Coast. You can even make a character using all the sourcebooks WotC published and play that character in a Swifttail game with little to no translation.

Also, the transitioning from Standard to Swifttail is easy enough and I invite you to compare things with WotC’s rulebooks to see where things differ. You’ll find that the majority of the rules remain the same but just written differently so that your eye will get to the important stuff. You’re probably wondering where you can find everything about Swifttail. Glad you asked.

Item: Supplementary Documents

Since we’re going to be using a lot of a material designed to work with D&D 5E here, I need to address a problem on how I can present this in Substack. Substack is meant for e-mail lists, and its on-site editor is geared for that purpose. That means no tables, type variety is limited, you have to use image files for fancy text, and a lot of other items that just won’t fit. And then there’s the restriction Google Mail imposes which I’ll be flat out ignoring.

So a secondary area to store and share these much larger documents is in order. That’s where my subscription to Microsoft 365 comes in.

Access to Microsoft Office and a terabyte of storage space for sharable PDFs is not somethign to sneeze at. In fact, I decided to make use of it by creating a style sheet where these Supplementary Documents, will resemble a would be perfect for this role. I even created a style sheet for these documents.

Can you use Swifttail, even if it’s only in part if not completely replacing the rules system, in your D&D 5E game? Certainly!

Will there be a Swifttail D&D System Resource Document? Eventually. It is one of my goals here is to promote Swifttail, and that means I should have it available.

Will Swifttail cost anything? Bleep No. Swifttail is what US copyright law would call a transformative work and as such is allowed…as long as it’s not commercial. When the Swifttail OSR is up and running, it’ll be made available for free for all to use.

Item: Evolving Stat Block.

As expected, most of the characters I’ll be making here will have a fully fleshed out Stat Block for each of them, maybe multiple ones. But there are some characters that will be special. Two of them in fact, each of them the central character in their own story. These characters will have what’s known as an Evolving Stat Block. As the story begins, the stat block wouldn’t have much, just some tweaks away from the Commoner stat block. But as the story progresses, things get added to the stat block, especially when the character starts taking classes, finds magic items, gains proficiencies, and has the much-desired character development. The Evolving Stat Block will grow along with the character, and it’ll grow in ways that would surprise you, and might surprise me, and I’ll be writing it.

Just so you know, that while I try to follow the progression in D&D 5E, I might not stick to it. If a character gets an impromptu boon or feat or ability during the story and they’re not at a Level Up milestone yet…it’s going into an updated evolving stat block anyway. This is the OSR, beeeaaatches.

Evolving Stat Blocks will serve two purposes: As you noticed, one of them is to chart the progression of the character. The second purpose is to curtail a good amount of Mary Sue-ing.

If you don’t know what a Mary Sue is, there’s a decent YouTube video on the subject, and its modern-day equivalent that is plaguing movies, comic books, and video games today.

I won’t bore you on the details behind such abominations as Wesley Crusher, Rey, or what’s going on in The Last of Us, Part II. But as someone who has made Mary Sue characters myself in the past, I’m under court order to explain why people do these things: It’s just like men with ED go out and buy Lamborghinis to drive around; they are overcompensating. The person creating a Mary Sue character is trying to make up for a sucky real life by living vicariously in their writing, and though maybe not intentional, they take things to the other extreme. Someone who just don’t seem to get anything right write a story where they are perfect in everything. People who are acne ridden, too short, and had a protruding forehead; they would put themselves in a character that resembles a romance novel cover. Incels will end up having a harem. Those with school problems find themselves getting straight A’s without even trying. Those who got into so much trouble that they lock themselves into their bedrooms out of self-preservation, turn into societal paragons where they’re universally loved. And those who think that they’re the world’s chew toy end up in a story where the world bends over and hands everything to them.

So I thought up a way to keep myself from turning my characters here into Mary Sues: I implement two factors in my writing: Randomness and progression. The characters start off at most Level 1, or even better, just a slightly tweaked Commoner stat block. As the story progresses, the character grows, learns things, acquires skills, gets good, and so much other events that add to the character’s stat block. And as I write the story and I run into a part where I can implement a bit of randomness, whenever a character makes a check or performs an action, I’d roll a d20 by my keyboard and consult a stat block to find out what happens in the next scene. This will make things a bit more surprising when you don’t know what’s going to happen and recovering from a botched roll could become part of the fun. And the character would appear as less perfect, more three dimensional, and more in a world where even God runs into Murphy’s Law.

Item: Penumaria is Not Earth

Okay, a little head’s up here. I might lose some of you in this passage. No, I’m not going to talk about God this time. Even He wishes I didn’t have to say what I’m about to say, and I certainly don’t want to. But we live in the Current Year and it’s bound to pop up sooner or later. Best to get it over with and make as minimal an impact as it should be.

I prefer to be apolitical. My stance can be described as ‘Purple;’ liberal in some areas, conservative in others, but I have zero desire to get involved in anything. If ‘Silence is Violence,’ consider me the monster in Carrion.

I’m going out of the limb here and say that it is the same for you, and it doesn’t matter who you’ve voted for in 2020. Or 2016 for that matter. I’ll also keep on that limb and assume that, in spite of any differences of opinion, you’ll agree with me on these two points:

One: Just because someone differs on some viewpoints as you doesn’t make them less of a person. (If you believe this way, get out. Go back to Twitter where you belong.)

And two: Regardless of who is sleeping in the Whiskey Hotel, it’s safe to say that American Society, in the Current Year, is in a very dark place. You can say this about Society in General, but I’m focusing on the not so United any more States of America here.

I’m referring to the extent and thoroughness this country is so divided. You might think that there were always two different political viewpoints—Red and Blue I’d call it—all our lives, and that may be true, but there was once a time when, people can see those in the other side as fellow human beings, maybe even friends and family, regardless of who their opinions are.

Not anymore. One election in 2016 AD and everything just went apeshit. It didn’t matter who won, the world would not be sane from that point forward.

And by today, it’s becoming scary. It’s as if our difference of opinion has divided the people so much that America is now split into two: Red America and Blue America. Two different Americas that could not be any more different from each other. These Two Americas have completely different belief systems, completely different ideals, different goals, different concepts of what a society should be, different rules on how we should conduct ourselves, different things they hold sacred…different economies, they won’t let the other side use the same banks…different Histories…they don’t even speak the same Language and both of them speak English. They don’t even see the other side as part of the same country as them. They don’t even fly the same flag. Or sing the same National Anthem. There are people in one side that would not only break up with people on the other side, but they would also disown children or parents if they weren’t on the same side as them.

This is not going to end well. Something is going to snap, and when it happens, I don’t want to be anywhere near it.

This is why I put a lot of Isekai in these stories. It’s why I’ll constantly harp in this SubStack that Penumaria is NOT Earth. It’s why I make sure that my terms are well defined, especially when they’re different from what most people would expect them to be. Especially for those who would say that words can mean whatever they want to at any given time. Those people can’t be my friends.

Also, I need to let people know that, in spite of me trying to write around it, there will be come pieces where what I just talked about is at least touched, at least in a derivative form. Even though I did take steps to make this as low impact as possible, I just couldn’t take it out completely, much that I want to. Fortunately all of this would involve flashbacks and backstory that do not involve Penumaria in any way. But it might impact a character or two.

My intention is to get through them, get past them, and then just leave them behind where they lay. Almost all of them are in the background, with as little impact to the main story as possible, if at all. And they remain in the back where they belong, thank you so much.

Now we get to the Supplemental Document I mentioned earlier.

This Swifttail tutorial will show what these Supplementary Documents will look like, and I must say I made a very stylish template and style guide for these PDFs. It will include where Swifttail D&D differs from Standard D&D, introduce the first official character in Penumaria, Eisenhower Bronzehammer. Do some more pontificating on what I discussed here. and even described how I came up with the style sheet. And some other things put together in this first Supplementary Document. This file, as well as in future supplemental documents, will eventually be compiled into a local Microsoft OneNote Book for organization and searchability. And eventually an SRD for Swifttail will come around.

Here is the URL to the document: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AjNYReLtj6OInXeiejmXxzG9tx_3

In future articles

The next article would be a short one. When Keith Baker designed Eberron, he had a list of seven things about his setting. I’ll be doing the same here. The article after that is an initial set up and worldbuilding with a lot of top-down concepts such as a historic timeline, how the deit…Celestials work…and in something that will never be cannon by Wizards of the Coast…how in the name of all that is holy did The God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob get involved in D&D. (“Thou shalt be no other Gods before Him?” In D&D, there are ways to get around that.)