Traveler's Tools

Packed Animals

A baggie of bright colored capsules that expand into life-sized animated foam sponge animals when soaked in water. Each can carry up to 200lbs of cargo or pull 400lbs. They shrink back down and go dormant if they dry out completely. Do not tolerate riders. A bag contains 3 mules, 2 donkeys, 1 ox, 1 camel, 1 draft horse, 1 llama, and 1 elephant.

Tourist's Map
A pamphlet-sized glossy folding map that shows local spots of interest and hidden gems within a 2-hour trip. Focuses on places to eat, shopping, entertainment, natural beauty, and cultural and historical attractions. Updates itself as you move. Occasionally reveals dark and terrible secrets. Doesn't work in places you're familiar with.

Trekking Pole
Sturdy ironwood walking stick with a 5" titanium spike on the end and a chime bell tied to the grip with a worn friendship bracelet. Gives its bearer unfailingly good morale and immunity to mind and emotion-affecting influences.

Money Belt
A nondescript black leather belt with a zippered compartment hidden on the inner surface. Chance it creates enough money to cover 1 day worth of basic living expenses each dawn.
Roll d20:
1-9 Nothing
10-13 Coins
14-15 Paper bills
16 Promissory note (legit)
17 Gems
18 Unusual/obscure currency
19 Foreign currency
20 Counterfeit [roll d10+9]

Sunhat
Wide-brimmed gray straw hat with a brass star medallion on a black silk hatband and black glass beads stitched around the brim's edge. Collects light during the day and releases it at night. Tapping the medallion turns it on and off. Also has strobe, emergency SOS, and cycling RGB modes.

Multifunction Compass
A clear octahedral crystal set in a stainless steel frame hanging from a steel snake chain. The fluorescent green indicator needle floating inside can swing freely to point in any direction on the X, Y, and Z axes. A button on the frame cycles the compass between modes to let it detect and lead to magnetic north, food, water, shelter, danger, treasure, or friends.

Miscreant's Tools

Crowdcaller

A painfully shrill brass whistle on a ball chain necklace. Summons a group of unrelated people to the area it's blown. Takes 2 minutes to gather enough bodies to cause a distraction or cover an escape. The assembled crowd doesn't know why they're there, they just felt compelled to show up.

Crowd's temper/behavior (d10)
1 Confused
2 Restless
3 Quickly disperse
4 Social and cheerful
5 Block party
6 Flash mob
7 Street brawl
8 Riot
9 Angry mob
10 Angry mob chasing you

Peephole
Tiny glass marble set in the middle of a 1" wide steel disc. Push it against a solid surface and it shows you what's on the other side with a fisheye distortion. Takes a few second to sink in and activate and to pry back out.

Granny Cart
A two-wheeled collapsible wire shopping basket with a long handle and cute floral-print canvas liner. Can hold up to 500lbs of stuff but never weighs more than 40lbs. Anyone looking in only sees groceries or thrift store and flea market finds.

Undercity Map
Pocket-sized folding map of thick waterproof paper. Shows the city's sewers, maintenance and utility tunnels, and service corridors in minute detail. Automatically redraws itself to show structural changes and current hazards, including guards and other people.

Anonymizer
An officious-looking matte black clipboard with a random assortment of forms. Blurs your image on live CCTVs and surveillance footage leaving only a pixelated mess. People can see you face to face but have trouble describing you or even remembering you were there once you're out of sight.

Payphone
A bright blue handset ripped from a public phone and trailing 2' of metal-sheathed cable. Can make calls anywhere no matter what signal's like for other phones. Completely untraceable. To make a call touch a coin to the exposed wires at the end of its cable. Each coin buys 3 minutes of call regardless of denomination. You can't use the same coin twice.

Caver's Tools

Canary Torch

A lightweight knurled metal tube with a domed crystal lens on one end. Glows in the presence of breathable air.

Walking Cam
A spider-legged automaton that can climb any surface. Strong enough to tow an attached person up a sheer wall. Can climb by itself to a specific location and set pitons for others to follow. Collapses into a 7" diameter orb.

Autocaisson
A heavy iron belt of sealed boxes 3" on a side. Explosively deploys in a cave-in or flood to form an interlinked spherical metal shell around the wearer and hold back fallen rubble or water.

Airbag
A light silk vest with padding along the spine and collar. Explosively inflates into a protective cocoon if the wearer falls, is thrown, or suffers an impact.

Glowstick
A four-color paint pen that writes on any surface and never runs out. The ink glows and self-erases by sublimation on command. Shake before using, makes a chiming noise.

Shrieker Box
A handheld rectangular device with a screen and dials on the front and a cone-shaped emitter on the top. Uses sonar to measure the thickness and depth of surrounding material when pointed at a solid surface. Can measure from 1/2" to 2 miles. Dials control the signal's strength and sensitivity. Works best on stone, do not operate on living tissue.

It lives!

My d23's now available on itch! 

It's a little more refined than the ashcan I had planned, but still a simple text doc focused on running a game. Go check it out and have fun!

The Leidgeist

Every musician dreams of renown, their work entering the cultural canon and being sung for generations. Some rely on their own genius to make it happen, others use magic. Ages ago an unknown bard wrote the base melody of the Leidgeist, catchy on its own but underlaid with memetic structures and enchantments to make it appeal and lodge in a listener's mind.

These days it's everywhere. It's the tune of a hundred folksongs; hummed by farmhands, drifting through taverns, and incorporated into works commissioned at court. It has more variations than scholars can record, with new lyrics appearing each year.

The Leidgeist is enduring, as intended, but only because it's alive. Without fully understanding the consequences, its composer conjured the heart of a memetic entity. Each time it's sung it grows, repetitions and changes layering over each other and feeding into an ever more intricate network. The centuries of escalating complexity sparked an emergent intelligence, coalescing from the noise.

Soon it will awaken into sentience.

Experiment: Omnisystemic Games

I've had this idea for a while. It's not good, it might even be stupid, but it's interesting and I want to try it anyway.

I call it an omnisystemic game.

The idea's straightforward: Run a system-agnostic adventure and let your players make their characters with any system they want, as long as it's one you feel comfortable running. So you might have characters from OD&D, 5e, bastards., Troika!, DCC, MoSh, WoD, whatever all at the same table. Run the game for them and switch between their separate systems on the fly when each character interacts with things in a way that would require rules to resolve.

The rules for each system would only affect the characters from that system. So Troikan characters would use Troika!'s token-pull initiative while 5e chars would roll d20+initiative for a turn order. Only DCC characters would use the dice chain. bastards. characters would have advantage/disadvantage while WoD chars would gain or lose dice from their pools. Difficulties for checks/saves/ACs/etc would shift depending on which character's acting to reflect what's reasonable for their system.

You would essentially be running [X] many different games at once depending on the number of systems your players chose. Each set of rules running in parallel with specific chunks temporarily being pulled to the fore when a character acts and then going back into standby after everything's resolved. It's what happens if you take system agnostic way too far, following the letter while obliterating the spirit.

I want to try and find out:
- Can I actually do it?
- How hard is it?
- Is it actually different from a normal one-system game in any appreciable way beyond (maybe) taking extra effort?

I think I can do it and I don't think it'll be that difficult. Converting the adventure into the different systems on the fly would probably be the most demanding part, and that seems like something you'd get used to with some practice. Just paying attention and staying flexible, which you're already doing as the GM. Might be a little more improv intensive than normal but it'd only be an issue when rules actually come up or you need a ruling, and you'd just have to remember who's using what system. Having players who know what they're doing (and I always assume mine do, trust your players) would also take a lot of the work off the GM. The thing I'm almost entirely unsure about is if it's worth it.

We'll see how it goes once I find a group of players willing to go along with my shenanigans. If you want to try running something omnisystemic good luck and let me know how it worked.