MORBIDGAMES

I don’t think I’ll talk too much about equipment, other than to say that I feel that adventuring equipment is very situational to the story you have created for your players, and as a result you can easily spend the better part of a day preparing gear for characters. What I tend to do is ask my players about their characters and what gear they would like and then create something appropriate for them.

This is why I had clockwork in my game. Well, there are plenty of good reasons why I have clockwork in my game, but when I was first looking at how to add them to the game, it was really based on a player who wanted a robot dog he could interact with. Think of the personality of “dogmeat” from A Boy and His Dog (1969), but then make him a robot, or much cooler version of an AIBO.

As I flip through the pages on clockwork in Ave Molech, I just realized I didn’t mention anything about the PMMT (Post Master Message Terminal) system I mention throughout the game. To go on a brief tangent, if you thought the PMMT sounded like an old school internet bulletin board system, you nailed it. I basically wanted to create a rudimentary internet communications service that would exist in this world, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t turn into any type of alternate Snow Crash type world.

The main monsters in the game were always intended to be the Hybrude, and they still are, but a level one character can’t fight them, so I needed to add in a bit of the standard chicken broth to the soup mix. The Witiku and Blood Hounds were things I worked on for a while before I felt like I had gotten them right. With the Witiku I really wanted something that I could use to control why people don’t go rushing into Storms to bring the dead back to life, as well as I wanted a creature that would make any level 20 player hesitate. The Blood Hounds on the other hand were my take on the hounds from Resident Evil (the movies).

Now what’s common in my world is probably not common place in many other worlds. I really wanted my world to feel like it was in turmoil, people were strong, and had to be, because there is a bunch of crazy shit outside. This is why I use shape changers like Doppelgangers, Aranea and Barghest, as well as a lot of the weird Phasm and Chaos Beast stuff. Pseudonatural  elements and the template just seemed to make the most sense for creatures in my world.