[GLOG] Architect

 Continuing on today's "pokemon-ing dungeon rooms" train:

 Architect
+5 bonus Inspiration per Template
A. Survey, Eureka
B. Commissions
C. Infrastructure
D. Wonder

Survey: On entering a room for the first time, the Architect rolls [Templates + 1] d4s on the table below, learning the information from each result rolled. This works once per room, unless it gets renovated.

The Architect knows something about the...
1. Layout. The Architect picks a wall and learns what lies on the other side. If there is a room there, the Architect knows the dimensions of that room. Floors, ceilings and closed doors count as 'walls' for this ability.

2. History. The Architect learns when and why the room was first built. If the room is currently being used for its original purpose, the Architect gets an approximate description of the most recent user. If it isn't being used for that purpose, they learn what it's used for in the modern day.

3. Passage. The Architect ranks every possible entrance to the room in order of how likely someone is to enter the room through that entrance. Secret passages and teleportation are included in the ranking as "Secret Passage" and "Teleportation" but do not have their locations revealed.

4. Antiquity. The Architect may spend five points of Inspiration to declare that one furniture item or piece of art in the room is actually a valuable antique, worth ten times the usual sale value if sold undamaged to an interested buyer.

Inspiration: When the Architect discovers a trap, secret passage or architectural marvel, they record that feature and then add a point to their Inspiration stat. They may reproduce features seen in buildings they design by spending a point of Inspiration, or invent a feature (and add it to their list) by spending three. Invented features can't be magical, but encountered ones explicitly can be.

Eureka: Whenever the Architect rolls doubles on a Survey roll, they may insert an architectural feature of their choice into the room. The GM decides specifics such as placement, where any secret passages go, how traps get disarmed and what (if anything) is inside secret compartments. This costs just as much Inspiration as it would to add the new feature to a building the Architect was designing.

Commissions: While in town, the Architect can accept work designing rooms. The player has to actually draw out such rooms (with labels) and hand them to the GM. They get 12 gold per season of architect work, plus 1 gold per Inspiration spent on the designs. The GM is required to include these rooms in dungeons, fancy manors and other places the PCs visit if at all plausible.

Infrastructure: The Architect may now Survey outdoors. Layout treats any natural border (cliffs, rivers, tree lines) as a 'wall', History treats any space bounded by such borders as a 'room', Passage treats natural routes (trails, streams, mountain passes) as 'entrances' and Antiquity reveals natural resources instead. Eureka lets the Architect insert common terrain features for one Inspiration or ones not commonly found in the region (eg. a spring in the desert) for three.

Wonder: The Architect can spend one Inspiration to learn one of the following magical features: planar portals, rooms bigger on the inside than the outside, floating platforms, perpetual motion gearboxes and magma-proof catwalks. Each time this ability is used, the price becomes ten times higher than previously. If you can convince the GM that a magical feature should be on this list, you can spend inspiration to learn that feature too.

[GLOG] Psychic

Psychic
+1 Mind Template per level
A. Mind Palace
B. Usurpation
C. Architecture
D. Intrusion
Δ. Dream Door

Mind Palace: You have an imaginary 20' diameter, 20' tall chamber in your head with an aesthetic anyone that knows you well would recognize as yours. This is the Locus of your Mind Palace. Once per hour per template, you can touch a creature or object and create a copy of it inside your Mind Palace. This has no effect on the original; it's just a realistic mental copy.

If you have a copy of yourself (a Mind Self) inside your Mind Palace, it can interact with these mental copies. This lets you do things like touch a book and then have your Mind Self flip through it in the background, or use a copy of a wand on a copy of a tiger in order to figure out what the wand does. Making a new copy of something that already exists in your mind overwrites the old copy. This includes bringing your Mind Self back to life if they get mind-killed.

You can always perceive what is going on in your Locus and around your Mind Self. You control your Mind Self except where specified by other rules. (If they put on a mind copy of a cursed amulet, you're on your own). You have no direct way to communicate to your Mind Self, but know everything you knew at the moment you made the most recent version of them, including what you wanted them to do. They are as motivated as you are and as loyal to you as you are to you.

Usurpation: You can let your Mind Self take over your body. Your body gains access to your Mind Templates and your True Self becomes the Mind Self for the duration. After ten minutes, there is an X in 6 chance (where X is the number of times your Mind Self has been given control or refused to leave today) that the Mind Self refuses to leave, extending their Usurpation for another 10 minutes. If the chance ever increases to 6 in 6, it becomes permanent.

Architecture: You now have nine doors leading out of your Locus. By spending an hour meditating in front of a door in the real world while your Mind Self meditates in front of a door in your Mind Palace, you can permanently copy everything within 20' on the far side of the door into your Mind Palace. This includes creatures, objects, terrain, whatever. This works both with the nine doors inside your Locus and any doors you copy over using this ability. You don't have to know what's on the far side of a door to copy it, though if you don't want 3d6 orcs and/or black mold spreading through your Mind Palace, maybe you should check first.

Intrusion: While your Mind Self is standing in the Locus of your Mind Palace, you can copy anyone you make eye contact with, not just anyone you can touch. You can transmit your Mind Self into their Mind Palace (if they have one) or into their next dream or nightmare. If your Mind Self can find and defeat the person whose mind they are invading, they can rummage through their memories or use Usurpation on that person instead of on you. While your Mind Self is intruding, you cannot replace your Mind Self.
 
Mind Template: Your Mind Self is much more impressive than the real you. Pick a template from any class you qualify for. Your Mind Self has that template, but does not have your templates in the Psychic class. Nothing your Mind Self does can touch the physical world without Usurpation. A Mind Self can theoretically level up beyond what your non-Psychic templates and their Mind Templates provide, but if you ever reset or recreate them, they lose all progress.

Dream Door: If you have a Mind Palace without a Mind Self in it for a lunar month, you learn how to send your Dream Self into your Mind Palace while you sleep. If your Dream Self dies within your Mind Palace, you will never wake. Your Dream Self can do anything your Mind Self could do.

You're Using Mounts All Wrong!

 Or: "Horses Aren't Bicycles."

Consider the following scenario: the party wants to go somewhere that is Far Away. They ask the GM how long the trip will take, which results in some quick math dividing the total distance by the daily movement speed of the party. The players, hearing the result, wince and ask how much four horses would cost. They pay the fee and reduce their travel times by half. The horses are never brought up again outside of reminding the GM that the party now travels at horse speed, not walking speed.

Or, alternatively, one of the players buys a lance to go with their horse and leans into trying to joust anyone hostile-looking who they encounter in an outdoor setting. This is represented by the fact that the mounted character now moves at 60' per round, rather than 30', but still has the exact same maneuverability as a character moving around on foot.

Those are both obvious nonsense, but they share the same source: tables treating mounts as equipment, when they should be treated as hirelings. And not just nameless hirelings: the sort of hirelings who change over time, gaining personality and character as they go through shit right alongside the PCs. The sort of hirelings where you remember their names.

To that end, I propose the following two rules:

1. Use Horse Gaits.

Different horses move differently. Each horse is capable of a handful of 'gaits' (ways of moving) but a trot from a work horse and a trot from a race horse are two very different trots. Giving each horse unique gaits goes a long way toward making horses feel like specific individuals.

Walk. Every healthy horse can walk at a pace of 40' per round or 30 miles per day at a sustainable pace. If you're not doing some sort of 'changing horses at every stable' Pony Express business, this is as fast as horseback travel normally goes. Gait options don't change this any: if you canter four miles at the start of the day, your horse gets tired an hour sooner and you end up making the same net distance that day.

Trot vs. Pace. Every healthy horse can either trot or pace. Both are faster than a walk but can only be maintained for a limited amount of time. An average trotter moves at 80' per round for up to an hour at a time and an average pacer moves at 60' per round for up to two hours. Once a horse is tired from trotting/pacing, they need an hour of walking rest before they're ready to go again. Pacing is easier on untrained riders and gives a +4 bonus to any check required to stay in the saddle.

Race horses have a faster trot than usual (with 100' per round for 30 minutes or 150' per round for 20 minutes being common race horse trots) while gaited horses (ie. ones who can pace) can be trained to amble for longer and longer durations (3, 4 or even 5 hours) at their pace speed. As with pacing, ambling is easier on the rider and lets you do things in the saddle that would be much more difficult atop a trotting horse.

Canter vs Gallop. Every healthy horse can do one or the other. Some can be taught to do both. Horses who canter so at 100' to 200' / round for up to 4 miles, while horses who gallop do so at 250' to 300' / round for up to 2 miles. Once a horse is done cantering or galloping, they must walk or trot for an hour before they can do so again. Pacing and ambling doesn't count, which is one of the main reasons to prefer a trotter.

Weird Gaits. If you have a weird horse (or horse-like critter) it can have a weird gait. Kelpies can swim, fairy horses can canter onto a fairy trod, nightmares disappear into hell when galloping and skeletal steeds sacrifice their ability to trot for endless stamina at a walk.

2. Use Horse Morale.

Horses are naturally very skittish creatures. They are often afraid of things that are unfamiliar to them and need coaxed into understanding that an umbrella is not going to hurt them. Or cows. Or butterflies. Or lines painted on the ground. Or smaller horses. Every horse has their own idiosyncratic and characterful list of things that spook them. When buying a horse, working out its personality is just as important as working out what breed it is and how fast it can gallop. Hence, Horse Morale.

If you're using a system where Morale is 1d20, roll under, a horse starts with 6 Morale, +2 per thing this particular horse is spooked by. If you're using 2d6 Morale, a horse starts with 5 Morale, +1 per thing that spooks it. Horses bought at a stable start out spooked by 1d4-1 random things and thus have between 6 and 14 Morale (d20 Morale) or between 5 and 8 (2d6 Morale). Brave horses are weirder and weird horses are braver.

When horses encounter something scary (combat, loud noises, being injured, monsters) or sufficiently strange (to a horse), they test Morale. If the source of the fear is something this particular horse is spooked by, the rider needs to spend ten minutes coaxing their horse before the Morale test can even be attempted. Successfully coaxing a horse to overcome its fear on three occasions means it loses its fear. If the whole party has horses, roll a single die for all the horses, such that skittish horses either all spook at once or not.

On a success, the horse is unbothered. On a failure, the owner of the horse picks out a new idiosyncratic feature of the situation for their horse to be spooked by going forward and adds +2 Morale to their horse. If there's a goblin with a blue scarf threatening the PCs with a magic wand, the horse is more likely to be afraid of blue scarves or people holding sticks than it is to be afraid of goblins. Horses are weird like that.