Wayward Perchtling Background for Troika! Community Jam: Xmas 2025

Another little entry for another little Troika! community jam, this one holiday-themed.

You can find it and my past jam entries on Itch.io.

Wayward Perchtling

Mother Perchta and Father Krampus were arguing again when Saint Nikolaus arrived to browbeat your Perchten kin into service for the holiday season. But that old dodderer reeks of pickle juice, and you don't intend to suffer the sting of his crozier again this year. So you gave them all the slip, and sneaked down from the mountains under the cover of a snowstorm.

Now you fill the midwinter nights with frightful howls and raucous cheers as you please.

Possessions

• Empty Basket.
• Long, Shaggy Fur.
• Bundle of Birch Branches (Damage as Staff).
• A Large Winter Coat (stolen from a debt collector who was kicking orphans).

Advanced Skills

4 Cause Ruckus

3 Yuletide Lore

2 Birch Fighting

1 Gift-Giving

Special

You may Test your Luck to whoop, howl, ring bells, rattle chains, or otherwise do something loud and obnoxious to terrify a group of bystanders. You can choose to make them cower in fear for 1 minute, or observe the spirit of the laws of the solstice for 1 holiday season. The targets can be any age, not just children; your travels have taught you adults are more wicked by far.

Additionally, your fur renders you immune to the cold of wintry or high, alpine climes.

Perchtling by Coco Sketches

Thoughts on Porting/Adapting/Fudging The Banner Saga to Tabletop

The Banner Saga, or Post-Apocalyptic Oregon Trail Viking Tactics DX as I like to call it, was the first video game I ever saw crowdfunded. Though I lacked the money to participate in or experience it until almost a decade after the trilogy started, it has lived in my head in some form or another ever since. I have certain gripes about the lack of interactivity with the ancestral banner that gives the series its namesake, and questions about the way some of the cumulative choices pan out across the series, but I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay, story beats, and lavish artstyle throughout. Do recommend.

Often I wonder how I'd go about porting or adapting the game to a tabletop setting because for some reason I need the things I like to bleed into every other medium I like. But I never got around to trying before now because it feels like equal parts convoluted and "yeah, duh". But since I'm now the guy who spitballs Dragonlance x Talislanta mashups, it feels silly not to just go for it already.

Gameplay in TBS falls into three major categories that I will call combat, caravaning, and conversation.

Combat

Most of your time spent playing TBS is spent fighting or preparing to fight battles, in which individual characters take turns moving around a grid-based map and using abilities that reward planning and positioning. If you're familiar with the FinFan Tactics series or basically any Ogre Battle game besides The March of the Black Queen or Person of Lordly Calibur, you already know the basics.

Where TBS differs is the fact that every character has two separate "health" bars that have to be managed carefully, and a turn order system that encourages spreading the damage around, rather than defeating enemies one by one.

Because tactics video games and combat-heavy fantasy TTRPGs have so much shared DNA, I think that overall the TBS system can be ported to tabletop directly, with only minor adaptations to the turn and actions systems. The end result is something that feels quite different from combat systems where you roll dice for everything, but I think that's somewhat refreshing.

Stats

Every character in TBS, regardless of class, has the same stats in common. These are Strength, Armor, Willpower, Exertion, Break, Movement Range, and Attack Range:

• Strength (STR) is both attack power and health; you deal as much damage with attacks as you have STR, and once you reach 0 STR you're defeated.
• Armor (ARM) is a pool of damage reduction that decreases direct STR damage you suffer before being depleted. A 3 STR attack against someone with 2 ARM will remove the ARM first and only deal 1 STR damage.
• Willpower (WIL) is a pool of points you can spend on actions to improve them. 1 WIL = 1 extra tile of movement, 1 more point of STR or ARM damage, an enhanced version of an ability, etc.
• Exertion (EXE) is how many Willpower points you can dump into a given action. 2 EXE means you can spend up to 2 WIL on something at a time, etc.
• Break (BRK) is bonus damage that is always applied to attacks vs ARM, regardless of current STR level. 1 BRK means your attacks always deal 1 extra damage against enemy ARM.
• Movement Range is how many tiles you can move in a turn. Diagonal movement costs 2.
• Attack Range is how many tiles away you can attack from. 1 is most melee units, 2 is some spearmen and others with long reach, and 3 or more is most ranged units.

In addition, most characters have 0-1 Passive Abilities and 1-3 Active Abilities, depending on class and level.

Size is also a factor that comes into play, although I wouldn't call it a stat like the others. Size is usually either 1x1 tile for humans, or 2x2 tiles for big beefy Varl boys, with less common creatures taking up different configurations of space.

This facet of the game is very easy to port to tabletop. Most PCs and monsters should have pretty small, manageable stat blocks if you choose to stick with the level of individual mechanical complexity offered by in-game classes. A character could have something like this for most of their career:

Sindri Unnsbur, Human Spearman

STR 8, ARM 6, WIL 5, EXE 1, BRK 1

Move 5, Range 2, Size 1x1

Passive: Embolden - Each kill the Spearman makes encourages allies to fight harder, granting 1 Willpower to the Spearman and any adjacent allies.

Active: Impale - Skewer an adjacent enemy unit, doing normal Strength damage (100% chance to hit) before knocking it back. Impaled characters Bleed for 1 round, taking 1 Strength damage for each tile moved.

And that's it.

Talents

Alright it turns out I was lying when I said "and that's it" for character stats in this game. That's because in my first draft of this post I entirely forgot that Talents exist, and only got remound of them when I thought I was 90% done because I just so happened to scroll past a hyperlink to them on the wiki. (This is because I'm not only a bad writer but also a bad researcher.)

Introduced in the second entry in the series, Talents are secondary progression given as a reward after maxing out your stats. There are 2 Talents per Stat, but you can only select 1 to put any points in for each. That makes 10 Talents, each with 6 ranks that improve their passive benefits by some percentile value, usually +5/10% per rank. You buy the first 3 ranks with promotion points, and can find rare items that give a bonus of +1 to +3 to them in your travels.

Talents let you specialize your characters a little more, making them better at the existing combat systems without radically changing them:

• Hunker Down (ARM) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 ARM damage per hit.
• Tighten Straps (ARM) grants a 20-45% chance to regenerate 1 ARM per turn.
• Robust (STR) grants a 20% chance to resist 1-6 STR damage per hit.
• Artery Strike (STR) grants 10-35% added Critical Hit chance. (Double all STR damage, including WP expended on the attack. AoE attacks and attacks from passive traits can crit.)
• Defy (WP) grants a 30-80% chance to straight up ignore a killing blow but be reduced to 1 STR.
• Stubborn (WP) grants a 20% chance to regenerate 1-6 WP per turn.
• Dodge (EXE) grants a 5-30% chance to avoid STR attacks completely.
• Lucky Shot (EXE) grants 30-80% added hit chance.
• Exploit (BRK) grants a 10-35% chance to gain Puncture on an attack. (+1 STR damage per 2 ARM the target has lost that fight.)
• Divert (BRK) grants a 5-30% chance to entirely avoid an ARM attack.

The power creep provided by these Talents is mostly taken into account in the balancing of TBS, so even if your entire party hangs out unkillable at death's door with 1 STR for 80% of the battle, the battle layouts and AI are meant to remain challenging.

But porting TBS to tabletop messes with many of those finely balanced systems at least a little bit, which means that Talents could get extremely wonky late in the game. More Playtesting Is Needed to determine if you should fiddle with the values for some Talents, or just remove them entirely in favor of slightly deeper Class customization.

Class

Speaking of classes, those are the main way characters are differentiated from one another in TBS. They affect their starting stats, max stats, and abilities, and at a certain rank level (out of a max of 15) they can be promoted to one of two advanced class choices that grant them extra abilities. It's another extremely Tactics-esque part of the game, but not nearly as complex as most full-fledged examples of that genre.

There are several dozen classes in TBS, many of them unique to specific characters or party members, and many more available to NPCs only. You could port all of them directly over to tabletop without a hitch as long as you've sorted out combat (see below), but I think that would start to make combat very same'y-feeling when it's no longer just one person controlling the whole party, but a bunch of players in control of individual characters who can only use the same few moves over and over, and common enemy types become easy to identify and boring to deal with.

That's why I propose making classes slightly more complex.

At the very least, give players a few more abilities in their toolkit, and give them some freedom of choice in the matter. If you keep the trilogy's level cap of 15, consider giving them a choice between 2 new abilities every few ranks rather than just once, until they have 4 or 5 active abilities and may 2 passives by the end of their career. Lowering the level cap to something nice and even like 10 would correspondingly give you fewer abilities to pick or for the GM to design.

For example, give that spearman above the passive ability later on to reposition after using Impale, or maybe allow them to pick up a single ability from a different martial class to reflect them dabbling in other fighting styles to diversify their options.

Species

I want to include a little subsection here for something that is mechanically present in TBS, but never explicit: character species. You can never create a character in the computer game, so you're never faced with a screen explaining the unique traits each group of humanoid peoples in the game world possess. But they do influence how you use the units in battle.

(Minor spoilers for the types of playable characters available in TBS 3, if you want to skip ahead. I really wish Blogger had clickable spoiler tags as a built-in tool so I didn't have to try to parse through the solid wall of text that it spits everything into in the HTML view.)

Humans are bog-standard with the most variety of classes, unsurprisingly. Varl always occupy 4 squares because of their size. Dredge usually have a passive "Shatter" trait where dealing ARM damage to them causes a chain reaction that damages nearby Dredge allies. Horseborn have the speed and size of a horse, often moving farther than other characters and taking up 2x1 squares like Large (Long) creatures from the original print of D&D 3E. Etc.

If you decide that species is baked into class, you don't have to concern yourself with the details. But if you want to allow for character creation and customization where species and class are separate choices, it's worth keeping in mind the traits you would or wouldn't want to emphasize in your game.

For example, I'd be likely to drop the negative passive trait Dredge have because it mostly exists to add a layer of tactical satisfaction when you're fighting Dredge enemies in the video game, and it would feel kind of pointed and targeted if a Dredge PC was saddled with that all campaign; they'd already be dealing with enough extra trouble, by my reckoning.

Character Creation

I've kind of been beating around the bush on this one for a few sections, haven't I?

Character creation isn't a thing in TBS, which is completely normal for the genre. But outside of introducing somebody to a new game, just handing a premade character to a player doesn't quite light the spark, in my entirely unqualified opinion. TTRPG characters thrive more on either randomization or player customization, or a bit of both.

So if everyone at the table is creating a custom character, either give them a set number of bonus points to distribute amongst their stats (excluding Movement Range and Attack Range), or have everyone roll a small die like d4 or d6 and distribute that many points, with a max of +2 to any single stat so balance doesn't go completely out the window.

Then, either roll on your favorite random table or come up with a background for each character to finish them off. Maybe provide them with an appropriate item for it. A veteran huscarl might start with a scarred shield they used when defending their jarl from an assassination attempt, and that shield might fill the "armor" slot and provide some small passive bonus. More on items down below.

Titles

Heroic Titles are unique upgrades granted to each character after they reach rank 11, introduced in TBS 3. They buff the character with the title in some way, and they have their own renown tracks that improve them over time just like ranking up in one's class. Only 1 character can hold a given title, so in TBS it was important to match characters with titles that complemented one another, even if they might not have made the most thematic sense.

But in tabletop where each player has more agency, I think titles should instead be tied to how a given character has been played over the course of a campaign. It doesn't make much sense for the chunky varl bulwark to pick up Shadow Walker after a campaign spent being big, up-front, and imposing for example.

Personally I believe a player should have input on what title their character gets, or in creating a new title alongside the GM that would be appropriate for them. But you could also run the game so that the consequences of the characters' actions and their fame or infamy in the game world dictate what title they are known by, as an organic response to player choice. In either case there is more room for narrative consideration here that would be a shame to ignore in favor of pure min-maxing.

Items

TBS dispenses with armor and weapon slots or other traditional loadouts. Everybody can equip a max of 1 item at a time that provides some kind of passive benefit, often gated by character rank. The characters are otherwise assumed to always have all the necessities of their class; archers always have their bows, shield-bangers their shields, etc. 

That kind of abstracted, 'don't worry about it' inventory works well for what is shaping up to be a relatively rules-lite tabletop system, but at the same time there is room to expand to add customizability. Maybe increase the number of item slots to 3 or 4, with categories like arms, armor, and trinkets or accessories. Existing items from TBS can be slotted into the above, mostly as trinkets, and a few weapons and clothing can be added to round things out wherever the GM finds there's a lack of support.

... Oh hey, this chapter was supposed to be about actual combat, wasn't it?

Turn Order

Battles in TBS have a somewhat unique tempo. Where other games might use a speed stat or some other initiative system to determine turn order, TBS just uses your assigned party order. But every other turn in between your party members is the enemy's, at least until the end of combat phase called Pillage.

This creates a fast-paced back-and-forth between the player and the computer that intensifies rather than winds down the more units on one side drop; the last two remaining units on one team are suddenly much more mobile and active than they were in the first round of combat because now they have their fallen allies' turn slots, and if you didn't take precautions to weaken them beforehand, they're in a position to tip the scales the other way. I've never played it to be sure, but it kinda looks like chess from the outside.

Once the second-to-last unit on one team drops, Pillage mode activates, and all the units in the numerically superior team go in order before the lone survivor gets their single turn, making mop-up faster and easier and preventing really drawn-out and annoying last stands by either side.

The system is great for automated gameplay, but making the table keep track of two separate but threaded-together initiative cycles that will change in size over the course of combat without some kind of VTT aid feels like it could be a bit much.

That's why I offer (but don't necessarily recommend) some alternatives:

1. Add a speed or initiative stat. The character sheet for this 'game' won't be very cluttered, so one more box isn't a big deal. That value is your set position in combat order with no dueling rotations, meaning allies or enemies can come immediately before or after you, depending. This makes combat much more traditional.
2. Use group initiative. Everybody on one side goes at once, with attacks and effects resolving in the order that the party has put itself in, in order to empower players to coordinate and find a way to make the person who goes last just as valuable as the one who goes first. Maybe the whole party can spend WP up to their lowest EXE value to add a bonus to this roll.

Bear in mind that both of the above would render Pillage mode unnecessary, as well as change the metagame somewhat by removing the biggest incentive for the practice of wounding a bunch of units but keeping them alive until the very end so they don't give their turn slots to healthier allies.

Action Economy

TBS lets you move, then take a single action. Actions include STR attack, ARM attack, and using abilities, among certain other context cues. You can also Rest at the start of your turn before moving, avoiding doing anything to regain 1 WIL.

I see no reason to mess with this simplicity, except to suggest that you let characters move before or after acting. It just seems reasonable.

No Rolls Necessary*

There's basically no random chance or uncertainty involved in any actions in combat. Only a handful of abilities have randomized outcomes, like which nearby tiles get affected by certain AoE attacks, and those could easily be simulated by stealing the rules for when ranged attacks or thrown weapons go awry from your preferred ruleset, or circumvented entirely by just giving control to the caster.

Attack rolls aren't a thing either, outside of the very specific situation where a unit tries to deal health damage to another unit whose Armor is higher than the attacker's Strength. In that case every point of ARM above the attacker's STR confers a -10% miss chance (up to a maximum -80% to hit), easily resolved with a d10 roll or the like.

Overall this is the easiest piece to port to tabletop, to the point that it almost feels too simple. It's not a dumbing-down of combat, though- it just gives more room for other parts of combat to be more tactical, and lets all sides operate and strategize with a sense of confidence uncommon to tabletop, I feel.

Renown

Every enemy you deep six in TBS grants the character who dealt the killing blow 1 point of Renown toward increasing their Rank. It's essentially just combat XP and Level, but here all that matters is who deals the final point of Strength damage. In the video games this meant you have to carefully manage who struck the final blows how often, or else you could wind up with a handful of over-leveled kill-stealers and a bunch of massively under-leveled support characters.

That would be pretty annoying and cumbersome to coordinate with a whole party of live players, and unwittingly kill-stealing could disrupt the fun and maybe even cause some bleed-over, so it's best to drop that part of the mechanic for tabletop. Renown from combat encounters should be divided evenly, with unique rewards reserved for roleplaying, feats of exploration, out-of-the-box thinking, etc. and so on.

If you keep the upgrade track for characters' Heroic Titles, consider granting them 1 title Renown every time they act in accordance with that title.

Caravaning

The second biggest part of TBS (albeit a distant second as I look upon that wall of text up there) is the journey, heavily inspired by Oregon Trail and other lightly simulationist strategy games aimed at getting somewhere and managing your collection of rugged and/or hopelessly in-over-their-heads immigrants so you don't all die before you reach your destination.

I might've missed it in my playthrough a few years ago, but surprisingly I don't think TBS had any dysentery jokes.

Stats

Just like a party member, your whole caravan has stats that fluctuate during your adventure:

• Morale is the measure of your caravan's overall, well, morale. It represents your army and clansmen's mood and approval of your leadership, and it goes down from the drudgery of travel, up from resting, and up or down depending on your responses to special events. Morale gives you a willpower bonus or penalty in battle.
• Supplies are an abstract counter representing all the food, tools, weapons, and other resources your caravan burns through as it travels. Supplies are consumed each day of travel and every rest the caravan takes.
• Population is how many poor sods are following your banner at the moment. In-game they are divided up between clansmen, fighters, and varl. Fighters and varl contribute to mass combat encounters, while clansmen are the ordinary noncombatants caught up on all this mess and aren't often used directly as a resource by the game.

Let's break these down a little more separately than character stats before.

Morale

Morale reminds me of the sliding hope vs despair meters used in some LotR-inspired games, and it also mechanically incentivizes players to care about the caravan because their own self-interest and wellbeing are tied up in it.* Its 5-step scale can be kept as-is for tabletop, and whatever formulae are used to calculate it behind the scenes can be boiled down to moving ±1 along the track from major story beats.

• Poor Morale gives each character -2 WIL
• Weak gives -1 WIL
• Normal has no effect
• Good gives +1 WIL
• Great gives +2 WIL

Remember to take advantage of morale as a nonmechanical tool, too. At the end of the day it's not just a bonus or penalty to a combat stat, but a representation of the whole caravan's mood and wellbeing. Let it factor into roleplaying and the way the characters relate to the rest of the caravan in ways that couldn't be done outside of a TTRPG.

If morale is low, maybe the referee should consider the next random encounter to be an inciting incident for an argument between families, factions, or a challenge to existing leadership positions; if it's high, maybe an unexpected good outcome to an otherwise bad encounter would be merited as everyone pulls together and comes through. Use it to humanize the caravan into more than just a faceless mass waiting to die of dysentery.

Morale is a good mechanic overall, and fairly simple to adapt to tabletop. The other two, on the other hand...

Supplies & Population

The interaction between Supplies and Population greatly benefits from being automated by the game. Dividing the former by the latter with different weight multipliers added to each of the three types of caravan followers to get your running counter of remaining days worth of supplies would be a serious drag on a tabletop game, as well as very out-of-place in a ruleset that otherwise doesn't have much math.

So I instead propose going with a non-simulationist mechanic, like for example depletion dice.

Every unit of time of travel (whether it be days like in TBS, or something longer like weeks) and every extended rest to heal up or improve morale is a roll on the Supplies die, and a result of 1 reduces its size by 1 step. From a max size of say d8 or d10 it can dwindle down to a measly d4, and perhaps even further to a d2 coinflip before food runs out and people start deserting from your caravan or worse. Conversely, successfully leading a foraging party or finding a hidden trove of resources increases the die size by 1 step in turn.

Similarly, Population has a die that increases as new people join the caravan and decreases as they settle down, desert, or die in large numbers. An increase in the Population die may call for a Supplies check to see if it drops in size or not. Population doesn't require daily checks like Supplies do, being reserved for bigger events like helping to resettle a village or fighting in a War (more on that below).

The basic idea to stick to is you only need to worry about big, discrete events so you don't have to stop the game to factor in a lot of little minutia, like how many hours of passive berry picking the characters did and whether it matters or not.

Events

The meat of caravaning gameplay is dealing with the events that pop up along the way to your destination, either predetermined by the plot and your previous choices in events, or randomly drawn from a table of possible events with different triggers. Events typically have two or more branching choices to make, with the outcome being anything from an increase or decrease in Supplies or Population, to entering battle or finding items, to even losing party members if your luck is bad enough.

Like random backgrounds or optional initiative systems above, events can be largely taken from existing materials in the form of random encounter tables from your favorite supplement. You can also trawl the TBS trilogy itself and repurpose its events in tabletop form, making them more open-ended prompts without set dialogue branches to fit the new medium.

War

War is a special kind of event where your caravan encounters a large, hostile force. It is a large-scale battle between two opposing armies that you dictate the overall strategy for, which in turn determines how difficult a battle your party has to fight, which determines the final outcome of the war. In TBS there are 5 options for how to approach a war:

1. Charge! - The most aggressive battle plan that is, ironically, also the safest for your caravan. The party charges into the fray and fights off the main force, facing a tougher than average battle while caravan casualties remain low.
2. Formations! - A balanced battle plan with an easier fight for the player but heavier casualties for the caravan.
3. Hold them off! - A very easy battle for the player but pretty considerable casualties for the caravan.
4. Retreat! - No battle for the player whatsoever and some really severe casualties for the caravan.
5. Oversee! - No battle, but with an outcome that varies according to several factors like caravan strength, party strength, and any specific follow-up commands given. It's kind of like the Auto-Resolve button in the Total War series, and casualties are often close to equal to Formations! on average, at least according to the wiki.

In all of the options leading to a player battle, you have the option to stick around longer and fight multiple back-to-back fights as you draw the enemy's best away from your army as reinforcements to the current battle. You don't get to reposition or heal in between fights, but you earn increased rewards and renown, and your caravan suffers less for it.

Combat can be resolved as normal, while you can probably have the party come up with more nuanced commands than the above based on where and why a battle is being fought. Let them find creative uses for topography or feints, or anything else theater-of-the-mind'y.

At the conclusion of a War (which you might just want to rename "Mass Combat" or "Skirmish" or something because describing a single battle as a "war" feels a tiny bit silly to me even if it is etymologically justified within certain Germanic languages the mythologies of which the game takes a lot of its inspiration from) you roll your caravan's Population die a number of times determined by the referee, probably based on how nasty the enemy army is. The players can reduce the number of forced rolls and therefore make it less likely for the Population to deplete by fighting multiple battles in a row, and by giving smart orders on a macro level. Morale level may also play a role in this.

If by some disaster the Population die drops from d2 to 0, it isn't necessarily a game over. Several chapters of TBS revolve around just a few lonesome characters, lost or otherwise bereft of their larger group, and that can offer a completely different flavor of game for a time.

The Banner

It's in the title, it's on every piece of cover art, you almost always see it flapping in the bitter breeze above your caravan. It has embroidered upon it the name of everyone who has ever lived and died in the clan, their deeds and struggles, and it will continue to grow until the end of the world. The banner is a central piece of the visual language and aesthetic of the series, but aside from a few scenes where someone is mending or adding to the end of the banner, or passing it down to their successor, the banner doesn't actually factor into the story much, and basically isn't present in the gameplay at all.

I feel like that's a missed opportunity for the series, but one you can rectify and take full advantage of in a tabletop setting.

First off, emphasize how important it is in-universe. It is a symbol of leadership in many ways, always being carried by the de facto leader(s) of the caravan, exchanging hands and passing from one generation to the next at various points as the plot demands. It's not a formal symbol of the chieftain, but an implicit recognition of an individual's guidance by the whole community. We don't see it happen in the video games, but losing or allowing the banner to be damaged could be a cultural faux pas so great that it's the grounds for removing someone from leadership; "if you can't keep our past safe, how can we trust you with our future?" and the like.

Second, think of ways to gamify that value. Maybe capturing the banner is an explicit goal of the enemy in many Wars that could cripple the caravan's morale until it's taken back. Maybe risking its safety to carry it aloft can have the opposite effect in a high-stakes event. Maybe the party can't cash in their renown to rank up or acquire heroic titles until the caravan has had time to rest in safety, long enough for the weavers to add this latest chapter of the community's story to the banner and cement their trials and achievements in cultural memory. You could make a whole event out of the subtleties of language and imagery that go into each weaving, and use several of those to bookend major arcs of the table's journey.

Conversation

Just roleplay, duh.

But seriously, the depth, tempo, and tone of storytelling and decision-making is entirely up to you and the table. It's both the easiest and the most challenging thing to port over because you can no longer rely upon the series' pretty solid writing, but that's okay; this whole exercise has been to give you the tools to tell your own Saga with, not to follow in the footsteps of Rook, Alette, Iver and co.

I hope this was a readable and enjoyable deep-dive, and that you can create something beautiful from these messy building blocks.

Assuming I don't cannibalize this to create my own FKR game like I have half a mind to now that I've read this whole post over, of course.

* I don't know why I give hypothetical players so little credit in my writing. My assumption that many of them will need to have a subsystem reminding them to care about the meeples is unfair upon further reflection, and also kinda stupid considering how many stories there are of parties latching onto the tiniest throwaway NPC the referee had no plans for. But I'll keep that part in for the edge cases.

An Alternate Universe of Dwarvish Art & Architecture as Glimpsed in MERP's Mines of Moria

Or, a Manifestation of Furt's Guilt Over not Doing More with the Art History Courses He Took in College

I've tangled with Rolemaster's little sibling in the past and thought I was done with it for good, but a recent interest in megadungeons led me to crack open Middle-Earth Role Play's take on the Mines of Moria, particularly with an eye toward what the book does with the deepest depths of the dwarf hold and the Nameless Things known to lurk therein.

I was disappointed by a lack of support for the latter, outside of a handful of paragraphs gesturing at the dark mysteries and scary campaigns one could place down there. But I soon found myself thoroughly distracted by something else that I decided to spin into a whole blog post: the book's art direction, or rather, directions.

If you know MERP, you probably know the MERP art MO: slap an Angus McBride painting on the cover and then fill the pages with black-and-white illustrations by the omnipresent Liz Danforth. Danforth's style features both action scenes and still life portraiture, often very naturalistic with a bit of art nouveau throughout, but still possessing a clear place in the timeline of LotR art with inspirations going back decades, all the way back to the first doodles penned by jurt¹ himself. It is no different in Moria for MERP 2E, except there's far more art deco in keeping with how most Tolkien dwarves are presented.

As far as I'm concerned she is MERP's visual identity, with very few exceptions. But it just so happens that we're talking about one of those exceptions today, rather than Liz's work, except where comparing and contrasting feels appropriate. She will come back at the end though.

The second interior artist in Moria is one Kent Buries, a name I'm unfamiliar with but which is apparently closely tied to a whole lot of Palladium books. Right from his first piece on page 18, his take on dwarves is... different.

Initially I mistook the helmet for a bird face headdress or some kind of weirdly floppy hood, since they're out in some nasty weather. But then I saw how the ridges sit and I realized that they were actually rock, or something emulating it. That, plus the incredibly chunky-looking mace at the dwarf's side confused me.

I'd only been skimming the text up to this point and thought, maybe these aren't dwarves? Maybe they're hide-wearing Umli, the culture of half-dwarves invented for the game, who live in the wastes between Forodwaith and the northernmost mountains. But with my second look at these dwarves a few pages later, I quickly abandoned that theory.

Facing toward the viewer rather than away, we can see the unmitigated lumpy glory of this dwarf's weirdly organic and bulbous armor and weaponry. The knobs and protrusions aren't random despite how they first looked to me, and care was taken in making each piece symmetrical. His helmet reminds me of something a one-off villain from a sentai series would wear. I was confused and perplexed.

Yet another face-to-face with a dwarf in strange armor. This one lacks the winter weather furs the previous dwarves wore, and that causes an odd effect where it almost seems like there's no distinction between armor and exposed skin, like he grew this out of himself rather than putting it on. Combined with those thick cords like pieces of tubing that keep appearing as part of their gear, he almost looks sci-fi.

Here are some standard Danforth dwarves a few pages later for contrast:

Notice the radically different—by which I mean very traditional—armor and clothing they wear, obviously inspired by real life human material culture from various parts of medieval Europe. Notice also the noncanonical lack of facial hair on that one dwarf woman; at least get some sideburns going, girl!

By now the book had moved indoors from the historical timelines and overviews on the geography and climate of the Misty Mountains, to move toward the domestic. The books in this series love going over every facet of their subjects in grueling detail, to the point that we're treated to some Khuzdul vocabulary constructed specifically for the game. We're also treated to this... excitable fellow.

Five minutes into Smith, Flux & Chill
and he gives you this look.

By now the text had clearly established that this book is about the regular dwarves of Moria, from the time before Khazad-dûm was abandoned. These are just two artists' very different depictions of the same community, presented side-by-side without explanation or comment on the part of the book. But the textual descriptions of specific parts of Moria lean far closer to Liz Danforth's illustrations, so Kent's stuff is just kinda... there. The readers are left to deal with these incongruities by themselves, and at least for me, it bugged the hell out of me.

Then I got to the first Kent Buries depiction of Morian(?) architecture, and the wheels finally started to spin.

While there are some clear signs of artifice like the squared column bases and that carved archway in the back, the number of lumpy and organic features in this hall of lamps and light stones is unmissable. These dwarves deliberately sculpted the room with these rounded features in mind, a far cry from the clean lines and sharp angles of traditional dwarvish art deco.

An armory receives the same treatment later in the book, although I couldn't readily describe it as one if the marginalia didn't describe it as such:

Those might be shields hanging on more of those chunky cords they like so much, but the shapes along the wall and column more closely resemble teardrop-shaped eyes to me. The weapons held aloft by the procession of dwarves are fairly mundane-looking, though once again their helmets are very ridged and rocky-looking, as is the knife or short sword carried by the one in the foreground.

I can't quite tell if that axe up top is just an illustration separate from the scene or a gigantic capstone decoration, but it's possibly the most raw and nature brut thing (a term which I've made up unless it's actually a real thing) in this whole series of images in either case, with a head made of slapped-together rocks that feels like it belongs in the hands of a Gruul Clan barbarian from Magic: the Gathering or something.

This next image was seemingly drawn by Kent by himself, yet within it the Kentish and Danforthian dwarf styles clash almost comically:

This incredibly normal-looking Chamber of Mazarbul with recognizable furnishings and fixtures nonetheless hosts a group of very lumpy dwarves, whose material culture apparently didn't develop so far in that aesthetic direction as to create books made out of boulders, or lecterns shaped like an outcropping of flowstone. The pattern on the wall, though difficult to see through the shaft of sunlight, even resembles the Danforth image of "axehead" pattern stonework described elsewhere in the book.

I don't know how to address this clash, and it's kind of the exception that proves my hypothesis later, but it's weird and amusing all the same.

A "freestanding" Kentish dwarf building appears elsewhere, this one a rare glimpse at the dwarves' surface level architecture.

Unlike the armory, this building's function as a watchtower is very much evident, but it arrived at that functionality by being grown and carved out of an existing rock formation, rather than creating something with blocks and mortar. This is the closest dwarvish equivalent I can think of to the broader fantasy trope of elves or other woodland beings living inside still-living trees that have been nurtured and grown around their homes.

I had been sharing these pictures with a Discord server, and one person pointed out how similar the hall of lamps and armory look to those old "Net of Being" paintings by Alex Grey, which you might know better as the thing where they got the face for that one TOOL album cover.

It would actually be pretty easy to explain all of this as dwarves listening to TOOL and taking a bunch of shrooms and call it a day, and I'm only half-joking. I think dwarves would be fairly likely to cultivate weird forms of mushrooms given their limited forays into agriculture seem to focus on underground-friendly crops and root vegetables like earth-bread.

But instead I choose to ascribe a deeper, albeit probably accidental meaning to this art style.

Do you all remember the Glittering Caves, where Éowyn and the civilians at Helm's Deep took refuge? 

Like a handful of other locations in Middle-Earth, they were directly inspired by a real-life place jurt had visited in his life, in this case the caves of Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. Both Cheddar Gorge and the Glittering Caves' depiction in the live-action Two Towers film (which I think was just a set constructed for the scene rather than any existing cave where it'd be a nightmare to safely navigate dozens of extras and equipment around?) are dissolved limestone caverns struck through with stalactites, stalagmites, bands of minerals, columnar rock formations, etc. and as a result have an overall extremely lumpy character.

Early in the Fourth Age it was the site of one of the last new dwarf colonies, where Legolas' and Gimli's bromance really started burning after the former listened to the latter's breathless adoration for the natural beauty of the caves and how his people would work to emphasize it rather than just use it to extract precious minerals. To quote Gimli's reply to Legolas warning him not to tell all dwarves about that pretty little place:

‘No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by

such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore,

not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of

blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of

flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of

rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as

the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that

are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights,

Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dûm; and

when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills

were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.’ ²

Gimli's fantasy, which eventually becomes policy enacted by him as lord of the Glittering Caves, is one of gentle stewardship of nature and its beauty. It fits comfortably within jurt's quasi-nationalistic, anthropocentric (or in this case, Khazâdocentric?) style of environmentalism in which conservation of nature's utility and beauty by and for the benefit of people is emphasized higher than raw as-is preservation. And in the distant future of the Fourth Age, I could easily see parts of the caves resembling that hall of lamps, or that craggy tower.

It's never emphasized nearly as much as with those caves, but dwarvish appreciation of their rocky homes is present throughout the universe. So I think it's reasonable to believe many more examples of naturalistic architecture could be found throughout the many dwarf-holds of the world, their history stretching as far back as the days when Aulë was finally permitted to wake his children up.

And if that style of building, mimicking the lumpiness and organic shapes of natural caverns, has been present for so long, isn't it also reasonable to think it would go on to influence other areas of dwarvish art, artifice, and aesthetics? Wouldn't those motifs and stylized landforms eventually find their way into smaller creations, weapons, armor, and even clothing? It's a little like how many real-life settled, agricultural societies adopt vegetal motifs which get so widely used and abstracted that eventually they cease to clearly resemble plants.

The Kent Buries illustrations, then, can be read almost like glimpses into an alternate universe where dwarf art and architecture was informed from the ground up (heheh) by that adherence to the forms of nature, rather than by the mastery of intricate stonework and yawning volumes shown in most dwarf depictions.

The images don't culminate in anything, and as I said before it's likely they aren't really "saying" anything at all, it was just one artist's personal style placed in an unusual context. In all likelihood I bet the reason for the two illustrators being present side-by-side at all was because of some long-ago contract, schedule, or budgeting reasons. But all meaning is fabricated out of nerve impulses and the consequences of random chance, so I guess why not read a little extra into it?

I consider the Buries illustrations the star of this book for that reason, as well as the reason that later in the book Liz Danforth sins against the entirety of Eä and all its creatures with this absolute nightmare of a Frodo face:

Delayed Happy Halloween, here's your dose of horror for the year.

At least we got that Absolute Twunk of a Samwise coming to the rescue like a snack back there.

¹ Jurt being my way of verbalizing the letters J.R.R.T., in typical Furtive fashion. Similar to how in the rare circumstances where I have to talk about him, George R. R. Martin is rendered down to gurm. I like how simultaneously "cute" and diminishing it sounds.

²  The Two Towers, "The Road to Isengard".

Crypt: A Found Fiction FKR MicroRPG

Recently I've been editing a TTRPG book with a found fiction element to it. By found fiction, I mean to say that the game book also functions as a book in-universe, a part of the fiction that has been annotated by other characters prior to falling into the player's hands. And unlike something like the Book of Gaub which is supplemental in nature (and which you should buy if you haven't!), this one contains its own stand-alone ruleset. I'm not sure if found fiction is the right name to give this, or even if there is a proper term for it. It's a little like the found footage trope in cinema, or an epistolary novel without the back-and-forth.

Whatever it is, it's extremely novel to me, and the first of such a game I've ever encountered, let alone had the privilege to work on.

So it's weird that just the other day I ran into another one. Two nickels and all that.

"Are you seein' this!?"

Trollish Delver, patron saint of this blog's pseudo-reviews and main character of my Itch.io collection, recently released Crypt, an addition to a growing collection of Free Kriegsspiel-style games in what was once a catalogue dominated by ultralight d20 and d6 OSR rulesets. Mechanically, it's Yet Another FKR Thing with one or two tweaks. But the mechanics are not the only reason why I'm writing this post.

Crypt bills itself as a recently discovered piece of TTRPG history, a long-lost game written by an anonymous British wargamer sometime in 1970, years before Arneson and Gygax ever got to work on the zero'ith edition of their critically acclaimed friendship-ruiner. The manuscript was lost for years amid the aroma of stale rhubarb pie and nerd musk in some West Yorkshire wargaming club, only to be rediscovered by one Thomas Culottes. Culottes did his best to compile the manuscript into a coherent whole and track down the creator, but he never succeeded in the latter, and once he passed away in 2021 a family friend handed the manuscript over to Scott Malthouse, the Trollish Delver himself.

Malthouse (the character) then annotated and published this manuscript alongside Culottes' story in order to share this artifact of gaming history with the world, while also helping to make it comprehendible for modern audiences. Malthouse (the real person) then uploaded it to his Itch.io, where I found it while I was five-and-a-half hours deep into listening to a new song on repeat until I had wrung every last mote of dopamine out of it (this one was country rock sung by Nurgle for some reason).

With character!Malthouse as our guide, the rest of the book is dedicated to the quirky and weirdly charming rules of the game itself, plus marginalia offering context, speculation, and occasional quips on the sides.

You learn that the creator was probably a theater kid because of their reliance upon Shakespearean archetypes and some of the language of theater that they use as a way to explain what the heck a fantasy imagination game inspired by Middle-Earth and Zothique is supposed to be like. Players are cast members treading upon the boards of the theater of the mind for example, and the list of character attributes (Courage, Humour, Romanticism, Status, and Friendship) is far more tied to interpersonal drama than to combat, which barely gets two paragraphs in the whole book.

They also came up with some mechanics that I find very believable as novel ideas cooked up by some wargamer who didn't know what they were doing as they branched out into a whole new genre in the '70s. Instead of rolling d20s to resolve chance, players flip one or more coins (ideally penny farthings) like a sort of proto-dicepool system. Yet it's still grounded in what the writer was familiar with in little ways, like the game master being called an umpire, as in actual Kriegsspiel.

The book is short and sweet with some stylistic jank, both a game and a piece of self-referential short storytelling. And for the price of PWYW, I thought that was worth a shoutout.

I feel a sudden and mighty need to "run" Lucian's A True Story or one of the lesser-known Arthurian poems with this system to see what sort of shenanigans can be gotten up to.

I Did a Thing for a Heartseeker Game Jam (And Also Am Still Alive)!

Oh, hey.

I kind of vanished for a few months there, didn't I?

I didn't plan on that, and had a few things lined up, but I guess somewhere between the new medications, crushing ennui, and the occasional terrifying explosion of real paying work, posting fell between the gaps.

But I'm back with something to show for it, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about other people's work too.

There are only about 5 days left on it as of writing, but an open-ended game jam for Heartseeker is going on right now!

I've written about my fondness for the cozy old school microRPG in previous years, and I was stoked to learn the creator had put out an open invitation for people to make stuff for or with the game's newest edition. I submitted my own single-page supplement to the jam a little while ago, filled with a few old ideas and a whole bunch of whatever struck my random fancy in the moment.

Unfortunately my fancy involved pretty gross mythical creatures this time around.

Anyway. Check the jam out, maybe contribute your own mini bits to it, or join the Heartseeker community. They've got a Discord server too, though I haven't gathered the willpower to enter a people place and check it out yet.

Lamplighter Class for Shadowdark

LAMPLIGHTER CLASS

Owl-eyed watchers, jumpy tomb-skulkers, or selfless defenders of the light who use burning oil and grim hope to keep the literal and metaphorical dark at bay.

Weapons: Club, dagger, javelin, mace, shortsword, spear, torch

Armor: Leather armor, chainmail

Hit Points: 1d6 per level

Controlled Burn: You specially treat your torches, lanterns, and oil flasks to burn 2 times as long. Additionally, you have advantage on Light Mishaps and other checks to keep a light from going out.

Blinding Burst: You can cause a torch or lantern in hand to flare up brilliantly, blinding Close creatures for 1 round. This reduces the light source's timer by 1 hour.

Brilliant Soul: When you give your luck token to a companion, roll d6. On a 1 you keep your own token as well.

LAMPLIGHTER TALENTS
2d6	Effect (2 duplicate = reroll, 3-5 if already taken twice = reroll)
2	Your Blinding Burst talent lasts for 1 additional round
3-5	+1 to the duration of Controlled Burn, or +1 to the d6 range of Brilliant Soul
6-8	+1 to melee and ranged attacks, or +1 to fire damage
9-11	+2 to Dexterity, Constitution, or Wisdom
12	Choose a talent or +2 points to distribute to stats

LAMPLIGHTER TITLES
Level	Lawful	Chaotic	Neutral
1-2	Spark	Flicker	Lit-Wick
3-4	Glowing	Guttering	Night Owl
5-6	Way-Lighter	Pitch-Burner	Watcher
7-8	Illuminator	Immolator	Firekeeper
9-10	Bright One	Lurid One	Watchmaster

Lantern Keeper from the What Lies Below art pack
Artwork used with permission by Charles Ferguson-Avery of Feral Indie Studio

NEW WEAPON
Weapon	Cost	Type	Range	Damage	Properties
Torch	5sp	M	C	1d6	Fl

Flaming (Fl): This weapon deals fire damage, and can only be used while it is lit. Each successful attack reduces the torch’s timer by 10 minutes.

"Steady on, crawlers! We'll make them blink first..."
- Arodin Hesk, human lamplighter

Earning XP Through Community Investment

(Misleading Clickbait Title: Elevate Your D&D Campaign With Orgies, Inc.™!)

A few times on this blog I've fiddled with alternate XP systems for OSR-type games, usually in a very surface-level and indirect way that does little more than gesture at other people who already explored the concepts much more fully years before.

This time, I plan to do better with the idea.

What orgies have to do with my aspirations of doing better, I'll explain in a moment. But rest assured it's nowhere near as interesting or even eyebrow-raising as you're thinking.

Today's post concerns the 10th issue of Dragon magazine, from all the way back when they still spelled its name with a "The". Content Notice for people reading along with the archive.org copy above in SFW environments: there are elf-presenting nipples visible on page 5. I suggest covering the art with a nice, beige window or piece of construction paper depending on reading device, if necessary.

In this issue Jon Pickens debuted one of two alternate experience systems for D&D which would release that year, the other being Dave Arneson's in The First Fantasy Campaign. Unlike Arneson's rather dry title for a gameplay aid, Jon's article goes under a title that would not be out of place in today's world of clickbait, which is an impressive feat for 1977. Though, I guess advertising has always been preying on the same parts of the human psyche, just using different tools throughout the ages.

Orgies, Inc.

"Orgies, Inc." inverts the OD&D standard of experience points being awarded equal to the number of gold pieces in treasure looted from the dungeon and brought back to civilization. Instead, XP is awarded only when gold pieces are spent in a way that effectively removes them from the game without direct benefit to the players. So, coming home and blowing all that gold on a new stronghold or obtaining magic items wouldn't count toward leveling up. The article provides a list of possible income-burners, ranging from religious sacrifices whose entry ends midsentence, to philanthropy, to spell research- the last of which is cheating a little, since you actually can get material (magical) benefit out of that option.

The orgies do eventually appear, at the bottom of the list. The actual description is simultaneously tame and outlandish, glossing over the activity as "lusty indulgence in wine, women, and song" at a tavern which can somehow last as many days in a row as the participants have points of Constitution, costing up to 500gp per day. I know the PCs are meant to be larger-than-life pulp action figures in this kind of game, but when the system gives normal human beings a Con of 9-12 by default, it suddenly makes the world look way more like Oglaf than Conan.

There's also the issue of level scaling that butts up against that 500gp/day limit real quick. At low levels a weekend or a week of wild partying at most will be enough to level everyone up, but as the required XP amounts climb into the tens and hundreds of thousands of experience points per level, you're suddenly looking at weeks or months spent doing nothing but orgying or recuperating from said orgies. Which sounds exhausting at best and downright hellish at worst, if the DM doesn't provide multiple gold burners for the PCs to switch it up with.

If you'd like to know more about other attempts at "carousing" XP systems over the years that we won't be looking at, I recommend this post from Yore. Another Content Notice here, some of these early systems had gross and coercive implications about whom a PC could "wench" with.

Clan Hoards

I'm more interested in the 4th item on this list of gold sinks, however. The so-called Clan Hoard option allows characters who are dwarves or "other clannish folk" to gain XP by donating treasure to the heavily guarded public hoard owned and operated by their clan. No private individuals may make withdrawals from the hoard, and as the article puts it, the money is effectively taken out of the campaign.

This system interests me for a few reasons, not least of which being the implied lore of a public hoard operated by each dwarf clan. That terminology suggests a form of public ownership and public funding that the clan as a whole may dip into and benefit from, distinct from the private estates of wealthy clan members or a treasury owned by whatever hereditary ruler one might expect to be in a dwarf-hold in 1970s D&D.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it because I've been doing a lot of writing about working class dwarves over the past few months, but with that one line this option implies a very different society and political system than what was common in fantasy fiction at the time. And I think that's neat.

I also just like the mechanics of the system for the way they could transform a campaign and reorient it around a community. It isn't the only sort of donation a person can make under these rules- I did mention philanthropy earlier on. But philanthropy conjures a very specific mental image (for me at least) of detachment, both from the needy and from the underlying causes of need: rich folks getting a park named after them or preventing a bad harvest from getting worse, but stopping short of systemic change, and junk like that.

The clan hoard, meanwhile, keeps the PC(s) connected to their community. They have to return home (or at least meet representatives abroad) in order to turn their wealth over, which encourages them to establish their base of operations at home rather than off in some chunk of wilderness recently scoured of all inconvenient life and deeded in the fighter's name.

That creates opportunities and complications you might not get from a traditional dungeon or hex crawl. For one, you have a whole lot more NPCs you're likely to run into regularly, none of whom are necessarily beholden to the players as hirelings or serfs. Different families, groups, or factions within the community can bring different flavors and friction to social interaction. Events beyond the party's control can pop up at unexpected times. If they return from a long adventure only to find a natural disaster has struck or there's a dispute going on, more than just a monetary donation will be needed to resolve the community's problems (and unlock that sweet XP). Even the least personally-engaged PC has a stake in all of it to some degree, which keeps gameplay varied and fresh.

What to Throw Out

There are a few minor parts of Pickens' take on the system that I don't like. For one, the clan hoard necessarily being limited to clan-based societies limits its applicability in a (to me) unrealistic way. Lots of societies in real life can form intricate systems of social cohesion, cooperation, and resource management beginning from radically different starting points, that would nonetheless let them arrive at the same place for this kind of mechanic. It should be even more so for fantasy, I think.

Second and less nitpicky is the idea that the money is effectively removed from the campaign once it's donated. I think that's a lazy way to handle it, akin to the religious sacrifice mechanic where all the wealth basically goes up in a puff of smoke on the altar. It doesn't feel meaningful or impactful to the fiction.

What to Add Instead

I think even if the money is permanently taken out of the hands of the PC—which is totally fine—its impact should still be felt. The PCs should see evidence of what it's being used for and what goes on in the community as a consequence.

The most obvious way to do this to me is by reflecting each character in the way the community grows, since it's the mechanism by which those same characters grow more powerful. Take each PC's character class, background, or other defining features into account and consider how that might affect the place as they grow more prominent.

For example, the fighters might grow stronger because the money has been invested in community defense with a training ground, armory, and maybe some kind of citizen militia is set up. At low levels the fighters would be training alongside the other newbies, but at higher levels of experience—literal and narrative—they might be the ones doing the organizing instead. Similarly, a magic-user's need for specialized tools and a place for magical research might spur the creation of a larger archive or public library in town.

With this little change, the PCs are no longer leveling up and growing stronger through their mix of dumb luck and Main Character power, but through the opportunities provided for them by their community. It makes the game a more social RPG with a greater emphasis on reciprocal relationships, although the potential for exploitation in the form of dungeon delving in order to acquire the wealth in the first place does still exist.

Community XP

The simplest way to implement this system is by doing as Jon Pickens did, and have each character level up independently according to their own XP track once they've contributed enough of their personal wealth to the community. One might reasonably assume wealth and therefore XP is divided up evenly and/or equitably between PCs in the spirit of cooperation this whole thing is meant to foster, but there's always room for character competition or friction in a story about people like this.

If the table doesn't enjoy lopsided leveling tracks common to OSR games and the minimal impact it can have on moment-to-moment play, you can remove everyone's leveling track and instead give one big XP bar to the community as a whole. This can represent the amount of gold stored in/being utilized by its version of the public funds hoard from earlier on, standard of living for the average person, urban or economic development, or some other nebulous indicator of growth. Remember, money locked up in the personal fortunes or private properties of rich jackasses contributes nothing.

Alternatively, if you like the milestone leveling that seemed to get popular with the advent of D&D 5E (or at least I was ignorant of it up until then), throw out all the bars and XP and tie the milestones to various public works initiated by the community. This could take the form of funding building projects or the acquisition of certain skills or resources and the like.

More hands-on involvement from the PCs like labor hours or direct participation in planning/advising on the project could also count toward the goal, making it better for games with less of an emphasis on dungeon crawling. You could also probably assign a GP value to characters' workhours if you want to use that in combination with XP tracks; after all, is adventuring not already a form of wage labor?

Once a goal has been reached by whatever means with the indispensable aid of the PCs (not because they're better than everybody else but because the story kind of hinges on them), a level-up may be had.

Leveling Tables

Each level-up, a PC gains all the generic benefits: increased HP, attack ability, etc. This represents a mix of their own personal growth from adventuring, and what their community helped foster in them during downtime.

The player also rolls on the [Great Big Table of Community Upgrades]. This is a general table that everyone has access to regardless of class, background, etc. An upgrade is checked off after being rolled, and repeats are rerolled unless specifically noted in its entry. If XP curves are flattened so every character levels up at the same rate, or the table uses milestone leveling like the above, the whole party rolls at once.

The table can just be a regular old d100 or similarly large roll. Example:

Nergui advances to 2nd level and rolls on the table. They roll a 46, which means that greater investment in local food resources has given the community a Food Surplus. Rations and meals are always available for purchase in town, the population is healthier and well-fed, and rolls on the Complications table (more on that below) that result in famine might be cancelled out/ignored.

Later, Nergui advances to 4th level and rolls 46 again. This upgrades Food Surplus into Improved Nutrition, which improves the general quality of life for the people, gives the community as a whole a bonus on rolls to avoid plagues spread by malnutrition, and also gives the PCs a +1 to their next Hit Point roll.

Alternatively, the table could be much more narrow and use a smaller die such as d10 or d20, with higher results being better, but also gated in tiers by being far higher than the die size naturally allows one to roll. Only one roll is made per level for the whole party, but the party's total level is added to the roll. Example:

The party reaches 3rd level. Because there are 4 of them in the party, they add a +12 modifier to the community roll. This increases their roll of 10 to 22, kicking it up to the 20-25 tier. They roll 1d6 for the tier and get a 2, netting their community the Minor Magic Shop upgrade. This makes minor magical trinkets available for purchase in town. Or, if the table refuses to break the 'no buying magic items' taboo, each PC is gifted 1 (and only 1) minor magic item for all their help around town lately.

In addition to the Great Big Table, each character has their own Class/Background table that represents how their own personal contributions have affected the community. These should be smaller than the general table, but they can be full d20 or even d100 tables if you're feeling motivated/masochistic enough. Example:

Nemo the cleric advances to 5th level. They roll on the cleric table and get Local Devotees a second time. This represents the growing community of their coreligionists in the area, and allows Nemo to upgrade the little roadside shrine they had previously constructed into a modest temple/sanctuary/sacred grove/etc.

Opposite the table of Upgrades is the table of Community Complications. This table is rolled on whenever upgrades are rolled for, representing the unexpected incidents or setbacks that go hand-in-hand with the community growing and changing over time. They don't have to be straight-up penalties; the complication can instead be an encounter the party/PC is forced into, with consequences resulting from how well they handle it. Example:

The party advances in level and rolls 14 for complications. A climate-appropriate natural disaster strikes the community, forcing it and the party to devote considerable time to cleanup and repairs. This might strengthen bonds between survivors, or cleanup might uncover a hidden secret somewhere.

Characters could have their own personal complication tables, again dependent upon class, background, or anything else relevant to the campaign. Depressing!Example:

Outis the tiefling advances to 6th level and rolls the Not Welcome Here complication. Their growing fame and apparent acceptance within the community has drawn other tieflings to live in the area recently. Their more visible presence has riled up the local bigots, who only tolerated Outis as "one of the good ones" up to that point. Now an incident is about to occur, and needs intervention.

You could also put together some kind of cumulative group level complication table in the interest of maintaining pointless symmetry with the group upgrade table mentioned above- I know I'm certainly tempted to do that. But I'm unsure how high the stakes should be for something like that. Where does it top out? Plague? Invasion? A wizard tripping and spilling the entire contents of their forbidden tome collection out on the sidewalk? I'll leave you to decide that one.

I realize this still isn't an actual system, but I do hope that this offering of bigger- and crunchier-than-usual breadcrumbs might be useful in designing a community-oriented progression system of your own.