Thread by @Epidiah

Because I'm bad at following what's happening in the #ttrpg world, even for games I adore, I only recently discovered that Urban Jungle has not one, but two supplements!

Now that I have summoned the supplements to my grubby mitts, I want to tweet about them for a bit!

https://twitter.com/Epidiah/status/1570786625474666499

I'll start by saying that while I haven't played with these supplements—I've only just read them in the past week)—I have played Urban Jungle. It was a wonderful experience. You can feel the contours of the rules as you play and they guide you down the most intriguing paths.

This'll probably be a little scattershot as I highlight a assortment of rules without explaining the entirety of the game, but hopefully I can portion out a few appetizers to whet your hunger.

When you make a roll in this game, it with an assortment of different-sided dice—a collection of d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, and/or d12s. Then count how many of them beat a target number.

Quite often, this is you looking to beat a 3 (that is, looking to see how many rolled 4 or more).

During combat, and in other situations where you're directly opposed by another character, the target is the highest result on their dice.

But that 4+ situation is very common.

So you're a possum private detective, hanging out at the local speakeasy, discretely inquiring about a missing person. This is probably a Mind & Questioning roll.

You've got 7 traits: Body d6, Speed d6, Mind d6, Will d8, Possum d4, Hard-Boiled d6, Detective d8.

Just about every roll in the game includes at least one of those first 4 traits. Which is convenient, because everyone has some sort of die in each of those.

Possum, Hard-Boiled, and Detective are a little more specialized, though. Each of them has 3 skills that it applies to.

To make this roll, you'd roll your Mind, a d6, and the dice of any of those other traits that include the Questioning skill. In your possum's case, that's just Detective, a d8.

Had you been a Crooked Detective, instead of Hard-Boiled, you'd be able to use that die, too.

You roll that d6 and that d8 and hope one or both of them is over 3.

Bonuses to this roll, like from assistance or being an adept carouser, come in the form of additional dice you get to roll—increasing the odds of at least 1 success and allowing for more than 2 successes.

Enter the Opinion Dice. I 🐐 this mechanic.

Good Opinion Dice are bonus dice you roll when you're interacting with someone you've had a good interaction with in the past.

Bad Opinion Dice are penalty dice rolled against you when your past interactions haven't gone so well.

Individuals can have Opinion Dice on you, as can groups. These dice start at d8.

I say start, because they're also Dwindle Dice. Dwindle Dice shrink whenever they roll a 1. A d8 becomes a d6. A d6 shrinks to a d4. A d4 disappears.

Your possum at the speakeasy is chatting with the band on their break, and because you recently recovered a stolen sax for them, you've got a d8 Good Opinion dice to roll with this interaction.*

* It might not be appropriate to roll this opinion die since this is info gathering roll & not, for example, an interaction where you're trying to influence them one way or another. But I'm the GM here, & I know they know something, but they're afraid to say it. So it applies.

There are a lot of reasons to dig Opinion Dice. I like how they make obvious the connections the PCs make the NPCs, and the waxing and waning of those relationships.

You can get what you want through threats or deception, but you leave a trail of Bad Opinion dice behind you.

Opinion Dice dwindle as you use them, so leaning on friends too often can wear thin, while interacting with enemies can breed familiarity.

They also dwindle over time. The GM is encouraged to dwindle a few of them between sessions.

"All of this is from the main game, Eppy. Aren't you excited about the supplements?"

Okay, okay, right, but I'm laying the groundwork here. You're a hard-boiled possum detective chumming around with musicians, asking the right questions, the right way.

You're partner…

…is a broken alligator occultist, who is drawing circles and lighting candles in his furniture-less studio apartment. He knows a ghost who he thinks knows something about this missing person. And he's about to call upon a mysterious power manifest this specter.

Magic is introduced in the Occult Horror supplement and I must admit, at first, I kind of didn't care?

I mean, when I got these supplements, I was more excited about the Astounding Science one. I'm kind of out of my "What this game needs is a magic system!" phase, you know?

But these rules have turned me around.

There are a number of ways to get at the magic in Occult Horror, but all of them require a Power Die. Power Dice dwindle, just like Opinion Dice. If they roll a 1, they shrink and eventually disappear.

Some folks have a Personal Power die which comes from within and can be replenished under certain circumstances or between episodes.

Others, like our occultist alligator, can use Petitioned Power. These aren't just like Opinion Dice, they ARE Opinion Dice.

The gator is going to spend the day performing a ritual to petition a some powerful entity. That entity's Good Opinion Dice of the gator will become the Power Dice for the magic roll.

This, by it's lonesome, is pretty juicy stuff. It's got the occultist out there trying to please all manner of unsavory entities, to build up some Good Opinion Dice to call upon in moments of need.

But it gets better, because these entities don't just have good opinions…

If you call upon an entity holding onto Bad Opinion dice on your target, you can use those dice to power your magic roll as well!

This leads to all manner of toothsome story stuff! Both from the standpoint of the caster, research which god is beefing with who, and the targets!

Like, "Hey, we got to stop these cultists and their grave-robbing scheme!" but "If we interfere, it will miff their maleficent lord Xylitol, and there will be spooky consequences!"

The flavors of magic in this book are kind of perfect, too.

There are rituals, which are involved things with all sorts of requirements, each of them unique. Not a collection of spells you call upon whenever, but things you seek out in dusty libraries for specific occasions.

Then there are the sort of categories of strangeness that the early 20th Century was obsessed with: spiritualism, mesmerism, ESP, etc. Powers someone might legitimately possess or might fake.

Things that eventually find their way into a Time-Life series:

Another use of dwindle dice in the main game is Ammo Dice.

A tommy gun, for example, has a d6 Ammo Die, which means whenever you roll to shoot someone, you include that d6 with your roll, both increasing the odds you'll hit and increasing how badly your foe can get hit.

When the tommy gun dwindles away, you're out of ammo and have to reload. It's a great way to both make the weapon deadlier, and make the bookkeeping around ammunition a bit more entertaining.

Key here is that, while every time you roll that Dwindle Die, you risk reducing it, you're also getting that die as a bonus to your roll.

The Astounding Science supplement "introduces" a new type of die: the Breakdown Die. Like the Dwindle, it's a bonus to your roll, but…

…on a roll of a 1, you don't reduce the die size. Instead, whatever piece of equipment you were using that had the Breakdown Die, well, breaks down.

(Scare quotes around "introduces" because the Breakdown Die already existed in other Sanguine Games where it's also a ton of fun.)

Among other things, the Astounding Science book has rules for making and modifying gadgets of all sorts. Most of these mods introduce one or more Breakdown Dice of various sizes to the equation.

This, my friends, is wonderful.

Fact A: The Century Falcon is the fastest rocketship in the whole solar system!

Fact B: The Century Falcon is also always in a state of disrepair.

Make both of facts true. Give The Falcon 3d12 Breakdown Dice, which offer a tremendous advantage & ~22% chance of a breakdown.

There's plenty in the Astounding Science book that interacts with gadgets, the making of and breaking down of. For example, the Tester Soak, when can be used to stop 2 damage and recharges whenever something of yours breaks down. Because that's what you're used to!

Or the Boffin Soak which stops a point of damage, or prevents a breakdown, you decide.

These books aren't that long, but they pack a ton in there. There's so much more tucked into the magic rules in the Occult Horror one, plus a horror setting worthy of Weird Tales and a handful of monsters that do a beautiful thing that I might have to talk about another day.

The Astounding Science one presents another rather compelling optional setting. Actually, a handful of settings, depending on how you commonplace you want interplanetary travel to be. And in true pulp/serial fashion, these settings feel compatible with the horror.

Along with the gadgetry rules, it has a bunch of alien species, easily playable robot rules, rocket combat rules, rayguns and, of course, more monsters, most of which also do the aforementioned beautiful thing.

My dilemma is that there's too much exciting stuff in all this.

I want to run an Occult Horror game, set in Roaring 20s, with the whole Gatsby crowd obsessed over party tricks that draw the wrong kind of cosmic attention.

I want to run an Astounding Science campaign where the PCs are bootleggers who find themselves on the front line of a secret alien invasion.

I want to run an Astound Science campaign in their far-off future Space Patrol 1980 AD setting, with dogfights around the moons of Jupiter and interplanetary intrigue!

I want to run a hybrid campaign with the World's Fair as a backdrop where rampaging robots meet doomsday cults.

I want to run a core-book-only campaign where each PC is different murder mystery sleuth archetype: mystery writers, private eyes, homicide detectives, wealthy dilettantes, unassuming old ladies, plucky young kids, etc.

These 🚀 combat rules!

This thread is about to officially shift from "Eppy shares his excitement" to "Eppy thinks aloud as he internalizes the game in the hopes of playing it in the near future."

Enjoy?

Up thread I gave an incomplete look at rolling in the game. Grab a bunch of dice of different sizes, roll them, and count the ones that got 4 or better.

If none of them are above 3? Well, that's a failure.

But there's also a Botch, which is when you roll all 1s.

The best trait a starting character can have is a d8. Let's say you're playing a rich panther motorist, who happens to be pretty buff:

Body d8, Speed d8, Mind d4, Will d6
Panther d6, Rich d6, Motorist d6

You've got a locked trunk that you're trying to lift onto the back of your car so you can run off with it before its owner finds out. The GM says this is a Body & Athletics roll. You don't have Athletics, but you do have that swole Body, so you roll a d8.

Success is 4 or better, so you have a 5 in 8 chance of succeeding. Not the greatest, but not the worst either.

We'll come back to this in a moment, but let's also consider a situation just a bit earlier, when you were in the trunk's owner's apartment, rifling through his stuff.

There you found a curious formula on a piece of paper attached to the trunk. The GM says that a Mind & Academics roll can reveal something about this formula. Thinking ain't your strong suit, but you're d6 in Rich applies to Academics. So you're rolling a d4 & a d6.

There are 24 possible results here.

12 out of those 24 are a success on the d6.

6 out of those 24 are a success on the d4, but half of those are already d6 successes and we only need one success, so let's not double count them.

So that's 15 out of 24, or 5 in 8.

If you only care about one success, then these rolls are pretty much the same. If you care about how many successes, then you'd prefer the d6, d4 roll for the 1 in 8 times you'd get 2 successes.

But botches make you care either way! Because all 1s is worse than a failure.

Rolling a single d8 to lift the trunk has a 1 in 8 chance of botching, because when all you have is one die, all you need is one one to botch!

Rolling the d6, d4 to understand the formula only has a 1 in 24 chance of botching, because both the d4 and the d6 have to roll a 1.

There are other reasons to prefer more dice over bigger dice, but also reasons to prefer bigger dice over more dice. And I really dig that about this game.

For example, if you're not rolling in a contest against another character or suffering under a penalty die, you can go by rote, which is just assuming that half of your dice succeed.

Got at least one die in Academics and it just takes one success to read the formula? You got it.

But in a fight, where your rolls are being opposed, not only is not possible to go by rote, but if your opponent rolls higher than your largest die, you're in trouble.

In those cases, bigger dice are nice.

Ideally, bigger and more, but life is rarely ideal.