Seventy-Seven Vicious Princes

  Rank 6: Great Lord. The Great Lords do not need your love, nor your loyalty. They don’t even need your obedience. They don’t expect it. How could they?  They want your awe . This is how they survive: cultivated unassailability. Not of the men and women (who die like anyone dies) but of the Fourteen, and the Seventy-Seven. As well oppose the rain or the dark. As well rage against death than against the Great Lords. Imagine Zarkany burnt to the ground or slid into the sea–do not imagine it without the Council. Bring one down and sixty-two salivating suzerains line up to fill the seat. Kill one and take their patent and their place. Why wouldn’t you? Do you know what you’d be throwing away? So the bulwark has held for centuries. But Keve Kornel (Fourth Great Lord of the Day Council) has noticed the spiderweb faults in the foundation. The hellish exhalation of the Fabrication district. The nascent eighth ward. The constant cancer-growth from which the Council fancies itself deta...

Devils in Zarkany are firmly in the Hieronymus Bosch mode. They speak Zarkanian, but often have little to say. They delight in confounding humans.  Devil hunters do brisk business trapping devils, then selling them to the Fabrication District barons—burning a devil provides bountiful energy.  Devils congregate at places of power like flies to corpses. Most are no bigger than dogs or rats; but major places of power can coax bigger ones down from the Red Mountain. The largest devil on record was a  7 tonner, 24 years ago. Devils serve a few purposes in VICIOUS PRINCES. As chaos agents they make great sources for dispatches--their destabilization can be a problem or an opportunity in equal measure. Catch a devil and you can sell it to the Fabrication District factories for scratch. Most devils are pocket change, good maybe to bring a prince from  rank 1  to  rank 2 , or give a rank 2 prince some liquid coin. Any person-size...

Version 19 is up  on the carrd.  This is a pretty big one! I'm excited to get it out to you. I think I'm close to wrapping this up. As always, thanks for checking it out. DM me on twitter or find me on Discord if you have any feedback for me! Here's a list of changes in  Alpha Version 19: Part I Magic has gained a couple of untrained spells, usable by anyone. Now you have something to spend your points on even if you don't have any magic traits (as long as you didn't explode!) Part II Changed some GM advice to reflect the importance of rivals. A new section, Section 18,  describes the nitty-gritty procedure of actually running the game. Conversations with NPCs  has additional language clarifying what contacts can and are willing to do for you Running Projects  is complete now, with a baleful little prince illustration. Consequences  have been completely overhauled, and a new GM-facing mechanic introduced--the fallout die. Added some stuff in the FAQ, r...

Rank 3: Gentlewoman. It’s good to be a prince. Life is a song. Theft is sport. Soma has trouble understanding why everyone is so eager to overcomplicate things, but it certainly makes her career easier. Princes crowd around darkened tables in secret cellars, all guttered candles and twisting plots and furrowed brows. Soma is upstairs, stealing their candelabras. A songbook’s worth of ditties have been composed about Soma Sinaros.  Gems in her Pockets ;  The Laughing Prince ;  When Soma Came to Astrabek ; and the unspeakably tawdry taproom hit  Polishing Gems , which would leave an orthodox prince flushed and furious. Soma has memorized all of them. Her carpet-draped, redolent home in Fallaburg is full of uneaten grapes, half-tuned lutes, and a magpie melange of stolen shit. Some of it is useful, some frivolous, some from lordly manors and some from commoner businesses. If you give her a few minutes she could probably remember which is which. She hosts smoky, musical ...

 A recently finished chapter on the Gods (well, God ) worshipped in Zarkany. More on all of these figures (including how their priests function in play) in a subsequent post.

Rank 4: Courtier. Unsparing (adjective) 1: not frugal: LIBERAL, PROFUSE unsparing generosity . 2: not merciful or forbearing: HARD, RUTHLESS An unsparing satire.  An unsparing critic. An unsparing prince. Vanda the Unsparing is one of Zarkany's most prolific money-lenders. Vanda the Unsparing is aptly named. They began as an accountant-knight for the House of Fangs, as its old military grandeur dangled over the cliff of penury. They pulled it from the brink with such adamantine focus that they were made heir. Vanda the Unsparing does not love gold, or even like it. If power came from carrots (which makes more sense to Vanda the Unsparing than useless, soft metal) they'd bedeck themself in tubers. Vanda wants to hold your heart in their hand and decide when it beats. Your money is their consolation prize. Beliefs Morality is God's to decide and partition. We mortals shouldn't distract ourselves with it. A prince has no excuse to come to me for lending; the deck is stacke...

Version 18 is up on the carrd.  As always, thanks for checking it out. DM me on twitter or find me on Discord if you have any feedback for me! Here's a list of changes in  Alpha Version 18: A new cover! Hope you like it better. A whole new font!!! Wowie zowie! Thanks so much to the Velvetyne Type Foundry for their free font AVARA, and to that font's designers, Raphaël Bastide, Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, & Jérémy Landes. An attribution and special thanks section. General tweakening and tightening of the text. The GM's section has been updated with a (currently incomplete) section on running projects. Over in the Gazetteer, Knights are updated, and new sections have been added expounding on God and Magic. The mountain in 28: Magic & Devils  is a placeholder right now.

Since THE DEVIL CITY & ITS 77 VICIOUS PRINCES is player-driven, and I love being lazy, I've come up with a number of generators for it. You can get at most of them on the game's carrd , but here's me experimenting whether I can just put them here for ease-of-posting. If this works well I'm hoping to stick more generators on here as we go. This generator is for dispatches,  the game's term for courtly intrigues. A dispatch is a momentous occurrence in the city—something  everyone has heard about. The generator includes: How your princes hear about it The event that occurred Potential additional NPCs who were involved A potential complication if things don't already seem thorny enough Opening ideas --dispatches are meant to provide opportunities along with their seismic shift that PC princes can take advantage of. Give it a go or two--you can hit the button on the bottom to generate another scandal.

Rank 5: Lord The House of Amber Arpad Budai’s mother was gentle and kind. But she dreamed too often, and too boldly, and Zarkany is no place for the dreams of a glass-blower’s daughter. When his fellow nobles make awkward conversation with him at the parties into which the Prince of Amber muscles his way, they hazard sometimes a guess that Arpad–risen as he is from the deprivations of Chalktown into the halls of the princes–is living a dream come true. But Arpad Budai is not his mother; he is not gentle or kind, and he never dreams. Arpad Budai’s father was tall, broad, and strong. Arpad would be, too, if his father had lived, and if his mother hadn’t taken the bottle as her consolation. But he didn’t, and she did, and Arpad Budai is not his father; Arpad’s physical heritage was overwritten by the starvation’s stunting quill. Hunger robbed him of at least a foot. He walks like he's as tall as nature intended. Arpad became the Prince of Amber two weeks ago, by slitting the throat of...

 Here comes another alpha for The Devil City & Its Seventy-Seven Vicious Princes!  The result of a lot of thinking and playtesting. If you're one of my testers, thank you so much for your time... and for putting up with the tweaks along the way, lol. Version 17!!! WOOOO! Here's a list of changes in Alpha Version 17: A visual overhaul of the headings and subheadings Tweaks to the verbiage to better communicate that one player is responsible for a whole house, prince and knights alike Big overhaul to the magic system, to put it more in line with what I described on this blog. Knavery has been tweaked--"Sprinter" and "Acrobat" removed and their powers redistributed, "Athlete" and "Survivalist" added. Wealth traits have been replaced by Project traits, and wealth has been overhauled. I need to update the Prince generators to reflect these trait changes--I beg patience for now. A section is added on Projects and how to pursue them. Coming ...

Rank 4: Courtier. Cintia Nemeth is the eye in a storm of bachelorettes, giggling fops, and court scandal. Her immediate impression puts one in the mind of a painted sky lantern. Gorgeous, conspicuous, paper-thin, and entirely weightless. Catch her at a ball and speak to her for an hour and neither of you will have said anything at all. She has worked tirelessly to cultivate the talent. She’s an excellent dancer, a talented chanteuse, and a much-extolled lover. All of this she approaches with a falcon’s eye–crisp, clear, and detached by miles. Cintia’s a thin lacquered candy coating on a lead bullet. In the back of the carriage at the end of the night, on the ride home alone (always alone) she is still as death. When Cintia moved into Torchglow (as the House of Torches has dubbed its tacky villa in Blood Ward) she tore the four-poster bed from the prince’s chamber and replaced it with a dueling platform and a rack of rapiers. She sleeps on an unfurled mat on the floor. Beliefs With enou...

The magic system in  Vicious Princes  is something I’ve been working on for a while. It’s designed to go along with the scope and pace of the game–which is in days–but I’m thinking about trying to rip it out and paste it into my heartbreaker I’ve been running. Here is a first stab at that. How does this work? Gaining points When you come upon a  place of power , you can  siphon  from it with an hour’s meditation. You can siphon once per day, at either 7:00 in the morning or 7:00 in the evening  (not fully sold on this part) . Anyone can siphon from a Place of Power. Some do it accidentally. The fire of rebellion in a human heart instinctively reaches out like a candle toward parchment. The trick they teach is how to do it without blowing up. Magic (as everyone knows) is violet. You can divide it into two  spectra : Blue and Red. To meditate, pick any number of d8s and roll them all. Every result of 8  siphons a  point of blue magic  from...