"They're capricious little scrap robots, and I love them." The Wizmos from Dark Matter (a sci-fi D&D conversion by Mage Hand Press) are just doing the best they can, and it isn't very good.

Get one-page-RPG Wizmo Havoc here: https://scintilla.studio/wizmos-dark-matter-mage-hand-press/ ‎

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Dark Matter by Mage Hand Press:

https://darkmatter.magehandpress.com/

Music: Starmachine2000 by Wintergatan, https://wintergatan.net/

License details: https://wintergatan.net/collections/download/products/license-to-use-wintergatan-music-for-video-and-livestream-background-music

When you reached down to your holster to pull out , your standard

repeater, you instead pull out a banana.

You're not quite sure how it got there, but you hear this chittering

robotic laughter come from somewhere behind you and you turn

around and there's nothing there.

Investigating a little bit closely.

You come up to a cabinet and open it up and about a dozen inch tall little

robots that look like they're made out of scrap and other random material

fall out making this chittering noise.

And they're carrying your your repeater blaster and they run into the other room.

Following and char following in hot pursuit you, you get smacked

in the head with a pail of water.

That's been hung on a string and knocked to the floor.

And by the time your vision is cleared and you, and you open your eyes, the

little scrap robots are standing, atop your chest, chittering and laughing

and plotting their next prank.

have the monsters on your, on the podcast leaned toward the funny

end or more toward the serious end.

by percentage, mostly serious.

then I'll do the funny one.

I wanted to just talk about that one more anyway.

I've got the wisdom is in the book right here.

That's

Oh, is this what we're doing?

Yes.

little scrap robots and I love them.

Love him to death.

I'm Mike holic.

I'm the editor in chief of major hand press.

We also run a blog called middle finger of Vecna.

I've been making five E stuff for DMD for going on five years now.

Basically as long as you can be doing that professionally we've run two Kickstarters

for a really cool Saifai expansion to D and D five E called dark matter.

It's D and D in space.

We didn't build a new system.

We just built on top of five E so if you want to play a normal barbarian

or a normal wizard or a normal rogue, You can, this just sits on top of

the core rules and expands it out.

So, you know, magic is very much a real thing.

It kind of skews toward sigh fantasy, right?

So we built this, this kind of compact little universe.

Only one new base class, three new skills.

So very, very small additions to the overall palette, lots

of new subclasses, lots of new monsters, blasters, ship combat.

So now it's this, you know, solid, robust little book.

And we just did now in the year of our Lord 2020, another Kickstarter with

a starter kit, very much like the D D essentials kit that gives you a starter

adventure and You know, a DM screen and all of the other kinds of essentials.

So we want to, we want to support this longterm and if we think

people need that option in D and D, because a, it can be really boring

playing fantasy over and over again.

energetic and capricious whiz Mo's are little constructs manufactured

by a failed Lord to spread disorder.

And winsy throughout the mortal realm.

Each wisdom is utterly unique, but all the whiz most loves to get into

trouble conduct, elaborate pranks, annoyed, polite company, and it

caused a minor property damage.

Moreover, they do all of these things best when assembled into a little mob.

So they are our fun, loving little minions

The tallest wizman is a little low, about half of a can of soda high.

And the rest of them were about half that size.

So we're talking an inch, maybe an inch and a half, and they all

have different constructions.

Some of them have wheels.

Some of them have, some of them have feet.

Some of them have one eye, two eyes, little robotic spider legs.

They're cobbled together from kind of whatever.

And they all have their own little personalities.

And you can always tell they're nearby.

Cause they're making this chittering racket.

They kind of have a hive mind that just kind of comes from them, shouting

back and forth at one another.

the wisdom is brings something to dark matter that I think is really important

for D and D in general too often.

I think we want to make fantasy and D and D this self serious grim dark thing.

And that utterly ignores the fact that you play it around a table with your

friends, people you like to have fun with and laugh with and have a good time with.

So it's important that your, your fantasy and your science fiction

doesn't have too much of an edge.

You want to have fun with the game.

And the wisdoms are just us trying to distill some fun into a package

so that you can just disrupt whatever the players were doing.

So the, the.

The wisdom has come with two statistics, a regular wisdom and a wisdom mob, a regular

wisdom has the trait scram, which allows it to get out of opportunity attacks and

hi-jinks, which allows us to pull a prank.

The mob also is a swarm.

But we don't call it a swarm because it also gets the ability to become a super

wisdom which is where they all stand on their shoulders and make a little, a

little small size instead of a tiny one.

So now you have this little robot constructed of robots holding onto

each other's shoulders and ankles.

It, because they're a cartoon and they're fantastic.

Oh, they can also just swipe something from you.

They can just steal stuff off you because they're You know, just nonsense,

The

one wisdom is like an inch tall like micro bot and then a mob is like

challenge for, because there's a swarm and they can, they can, you know,

especially if they make a super wisdom, they can kind of actually pack a punch.

It's almost like three robots in a trench coat.

Yup.

Yup.

Well, actually let me talk about another aspect of the Wismec.

That's extremely, extremely fun.

The whiz Moe's.

Imprint on somebody.

So they go that guy's my master and they just follow somebody

around and cause havoc around them.

So you're not supposed to just throw these into the game as a one-off encounter.

You're really supposed to weave these into either someone's story

or make them a companion that does not follow any of their rules.

When I've played, tested them in the past I have this big dumb

D 100 ball and I give them that and say, this is your whimsy dye.

When, when you roll high enough, good things happen when you roll

low enough, bad things happen.

And I never had any hard and fast rules on this.

But the character was followed around by a wisdom mob.

So just things occur and IDM around that.

And it's extremely, extremely fun.

It expands the character in that sort of way.

And I go out of my way to have like, you know, specific.

You know, it's like, Oh, maybe it's so that they can persistently annoy

one person or maybe it's because they were made by a failed Lord

and they have this connection.

None of that matters it's because it's fun.

And it allows me to like throw them into, into the setting in a more concrete way.

And it's important that your monsters aren't just throw away a

one-off dungeon encounters, right.

That you can really weave them into stories.

When I introduce the whiz Mose, it is usually a sort of standard

plot hook thing that makes the players think that something else

is happening because normally the gizmos are just causing havoc.

So you think your ship is going down because something is wrong with the

dark matter engine where reality, it's just, all the plugs have been rearranged

and later they realized that this is all just a series of elaborate pranks.

And then the wisdom is, will latch on to one player.

Normally I try to make it the, the wackiest player around, so that we

can kind of expand that out and make \ them more of an element of the game.

An element of that one players personality maybe they attach to the

most serious player at the table.

And it, it kind of acts as.

F familiar or a minyan, but one that's more under my control or more

under the control of total randomness which, which really really, really

take what's the right way to say this.

Like it's really under the control of randomness.

So it takes a little bit out of everyone's control and just

hands it to the whims of it.

Hands, the reins of the story.

To procedural generation, I guess like it's, it's hard to describe, like it's

the reason we roll the dice, right?

Like it, it makes the story much crazier in that way.

Yeah.

making it random.

What do think about the Wiz Mo's in particular?

It makes them effective at filling that role.

I, I like to be entertaining when I DM as much as I possibly can.

I don't just want to tell a serious straight face store and you can probably

get that from, you know, My entire thing.

I put a canned trip in this book called finger guns.

If that gives you a sense of what wavelength them on.

Okay.

It's pretty good.

So I, I like having the ability to inject a levity whenever right.

Want, and also to pull small swerves on the players.

I'm not like pulling away their entire.

Their entire deal to, to, you know, railroad them down a particular track.

But sometimes I like to be able to say yeah, you don't have a firearm because

of the wisdoms replaced it with a banana.

That can be fun or the bad guy is coming after you.

And the reason he doesn't catch you is because you know he slips on an

entire hallway that has been covered in oil because of wisdom wisdom.

The, my discord likes to joke that if something in the universe

doesn't make sense, it's probably because the gizmos, I guess,

Okay.

you a really good you know, it gives you a lot of fuzzy room as a DM to

play with stuff and to just have fun with that and to not have everything

be, you know, deep lore and factions and serious NPCs with motivations.

Yeah.

Why do you think why do you think players enjoy that in the game?

It goes back to why we play D and D right.

We want to hang out and have fun.

And if you've got somebody at the table who is you know, going

to be constantly cracking jokes, they're like that sort of person.

Right.

It makes sense to bring elements into the game, then magnify that if you've

got a character that is, you know very serious and very plotting, like they

play their character like a strategist.

It makes sense to give them you know, allies, cohorts that they

can, they can command around.

Games are good at magnifying.

What we bring to them.

Role-playing games have a real magic for that.

So, so this is an element that we've put in the game to magnify levity and you

know, every element we put into the game players monsters, whatever they all,

they all work together for this tapestry that kind of multiplies what we put in.

I think that's the fun of role-playing games and the fun of board games as well.

Right.

You're putting in work to make fun.

And it's what you put in that.

That comes out.

So, so some of these elements are just like, Oh, this does one specific thing,

but it does it really, really well.

And that's, that's important.

It's important to recognize that you need all of those elements.

You can't just have an entire setting.

That's boring.

You can't have an entire setting.

That's comedic.

You need all of the elements to make something that's really special.

We've talked about them being a sort of embodiment

of chaos, a tool for levity.

Lighthearted.

There's no malice there.

But they're not necessarily helpful.

What does that tell us about the world we live in?

The wisdoms are most definitely a reflection of Things

just being chaotic sometimes I think in the year 2020, I

don't have to elaborate on that.

Not to date your show too much.

But yeah, when things aren't under your control you know, people have created

fake creatures and, and boogeymen, and, and, you know, actual folklore

to explain when things are just wild and they, they don't correspond to

the way things go usually day to day.

So the wisdom, those are really, really this tacit endorsement that

things just happen in the background.

And you don't have control over.

Specific elements of your world.

Like certain things might just act up and always be chaotic.

You might always have to tend to them, or they'll just sweep in every

couple of days and do something.

And you know, whether that is a storm or one person you work with that,

that isn't, isn't predictable at all.

Or, or, you know you know, a Wolf coming in and stealing a sheep I guess.

The wisdoms are an endorsement.

That chaos is like a fundamental part of dealing with life.

I guess they're also, they're also an, a way of integrating that in a

way that is palatable, because if you just go, this is a chaos based

and then it causes bad things.

Then, you know, I think to be defeated, it's something to be conquered, but

it's not something to live with.

And you don't conquer chaos.

You don't conquer unpredictability, you live with it and you try to find

comedy and levity in it because it's just part of the human condition.

So there's a reason we find you know impish pranksters in our histories

and in our legends it's it's because we try to find those things funny

rather than fundamentally harmful Loki in, you know, Norse mythology is a

prankster and a villain in most cases.

But we find something charming about that.

We find something fun about that.

We don't look at him and go, he is the arch enemy of all the Norse gods, because

like he is in the Lord, he's actively working against them almost all the time.

He's a prankster.

We think that's funny.

We take that.

If there's something there's some part of humanity that wants to go.

Yeah.

We can live with chaos.

It's kind of funny, but joke about it.

We're getting deep into philosophy.

I don't know how much this will take.

I think that's about the bottom.

But that's, that's why I'm doing this show is because each monster gives

us a handle to put on all of that baggage in a way to carry it around.

I've discovered since I started that there's a whole field of literary

analysis based on monster studies which by the way, it makes me feel incredibly

under qualified to be doing this.

Oh, D specifically has hijacked that entire field.

It has taken so many monsters that have ingrained histories,

like the, the cobalt, a monster of Germanic a Sprite of Germanic.

Folklore is now a dog dragon, because Gygax said so.

And now it's changed forever.

That's like the dominant understanding of what a cobalt is.

And you'll never regain that in the world, but it's a way of, I

mean, it's the way things are.

And humans like to take these things and adapt them and

change them throughout time.

I, this is going to be a really great podcast.

I can't wait to listen through all.

Thanks.

Yeah, it's a microcosm of oral history that we're, that we're getting to

actively participate in and see develop at this lightening speed.

You can get dark matter.

And the wisdom is inside that book at major hand press.com.

And we just finished our Kickstarter, but you should be able to find a link to

a pledge late, or just download the PDF.

The book is out there and you can play it right now, right away.

I have a one-page RPG called wisdom havoc, because we love the wisdom is so much,

we made a random one-page RPG, which I haven't actually played tested yet.

but it's like, you know, these have such a clear mechanical thrust that

we went and made a one-page RPG about rolling as many dice as you possibly can.

You're all playing a wisdom and you're trying to work together to

create enough shenanigans to save the ship from a threat real or imagined.

Okay.

Go for It

It says diva T appear Elvin due to their slight build,

but the resemblance ends there.

They have snow white skin thick black hair that is rather difficult

to cut and solid blue eyes that seem to lack irises or pupils.

Their noses are almost nonexistent.

Having only a pair of small slid nostrils that protrude slightly from the face

they're shapely and graceful hands have been three fingers and the thumb.

Yup.

It's pretty wild.