Secret Jackalope 2022: On the Shoulders of Giants

Round 2 of Secret Jackalope. Fear not Phlox! You have called and I shall answer. The following rules are Mosaic Strict.

What qualifies as a giant?

Giants are creatures large enough that they can be climbed on by human sized characters, an who are normally highly resistant (if not immune) to regular damage sources by nature of their tough or magical exterior. Giants include but are not limited to titans, massive dragons, krakens, and mecha.

How do Giants Fight?

Giants have a variety of ways to kill the things that bother it. While these methods vary we refer to the action of utilizing these methods as Squashing the Vermin and they are usually all very lethal. Giants have a 5 out of 6 chance to immediately kill whatever they decide to within the targeted area of their specific method. This chance can be reduced by the targets to a minimum of 1 in 6 by benefiting from: Concealing Cover(-1), Protective Cover(-2), Siege Cover(-3), A significant distraction (-1 or -2), Damage that’s just been dealt(-3), Hindering The Beast(-1) or Immobilizing The Beast (-2), Improved 2D Mobility(-1), Improved 3D Mobility(-2).

How does one damage and kill a Giant?

Giants are not invincible. Giants have highly specific “Weak Points” (WP) on its body somewhere, usually 1, 3, or 4 although more is possible. One must inflict enough damage to kill a human with whatever weapon is normally capable of killing humans in your setting to each WP before a Giant will go down. Generally, weapons capable of destroying buildings in your setting is also significant enough to reduce a giants WP by 1 (to a minimum of 1). Any weapon capable of doing so will usually be immediately prioritized for destruction by the Giant.

Weak points are very rarely at ground level. Thus people must either Scale the Beast or Aim Carefully in order to strike a Weak Point and deal Damage.

Attempts to Scale the Beast generally have a 1 in 6 chance of succeeding. These odds can be improved up to a maximum of 5 in 6 by: Using Appropriate Climbing Gear +1, Mounting From an Elevated Position (+2), Hindering the Beast(+1) or Immobilizing The Beast (+2), Scaling Unnoticed (+2).

Attempts to Aim Carefully has a 1 in 6 chance of succeeding. These odds can be improved up to a maximum of 5 in 6 by: Using a Static mounted Weapon +1, Aiming From an Elevated Position (+2), Hindering The Beast(+1) or Immobilizing The Beast (+2), Attacking from Stealth(+2).

Attempting either of these two things takes time, enough time that the giant may attempt to Squash the Vermin. If the Giant fails to do so, then damage is dealt automatically.

Kaiju Fight Club

If one Giant fights another Giant, they deal damage to each other as per whatever regular combat resolution methods you utilise for human on human violence. If a Character is Scaling the Beast while the two are locked in combat, they must deal with 1 attempt to Squash the Vermin. Either the Giants are striking each other and one has to avoid friendly fire, or the Giant you are scaling will attempt to deal with you in a spare moment.

Lethality

The rules here are very lethal. For more heroic games, have attacks not instantly kill but instead instantly down someone, or allow chances for Squash the Vermin, Scale the Beast, and Aim Carefully to be improved/reduced to 6 out of 6 and/or 0 out of 6.

Equipment Table Statistics For Into The Odd

In preparation for the upcoming OSR Discords “Secret Jackalope 2022” event I thought it’d be useful to take down the specific probability distributions for Into the Odd’s equipment table. Now why go to the trouble of doing this? Honestly it’s mostly for the neat visual and an idea of how to organize your content on a similar table. Chris McDowell has already explained what you need to know about creating entries over at Bastionland Blog so I won’t repeat him.

The basics of the System is thus. In “Into The Odd” (ItO) standard characters are generated by rolling a 3d6 for each of the three stats. You roll a 1d6 for your HP and then you look up your equipment on a big table by comparing your highest attribute to your HP. The table groups stats of 3-9 together for convenience as the probabilities of having you highest attribute in that range is ridiculously low as we’ll see shortly so dividing it up is mostly a wasted effort for little gain. This creates a neat distribution where weaker characters can be given stronger Equipment to compensate. Thus the table looks like

	1HP	2HP	3HP	4HP	5HP	6HP
3-9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

total of 30 different packages

When determining the probabilities the hard part was determining what the probabilities were for the highest attribute to be each number. after some tinkering I think I got Anydice.com to make the appropriate distribution.

As I said, really small probabilities for anything lower than a 9. These are the probabilities for each row (3-9 is 1.98%)

Thusly by dividing each of the probabilities by 6 we can create the probabilities for each item on the table.

Highest Attribute\HP	1HP	2HP	3HP	4HP	5HP	6HP
3-9	0.33%	0.33%	0.33%	0.33%	0.33%	0.33%
10	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%
11	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%	0.71%
12	2.48%	2.48%	2.48%	2.48%	2.48%	2.48%
13	3.2%	3.2%	3.2%	3.2%	3.2%	3.2%
14	3.08%	3.08%	3.08%	3.08%	3.08%	3.08%
15	2.49%	2.49%	2.49%	2.49%	2.49%	2.49%
16	1.68%	1.68%	1.68%	1.68%	1.68%	1.68%
17	0.90%	0.90%	0.90%	0.90%	0.90%	0.90%
18	0.31%	0.31%	0.31%	0.31%	0.31%	0.31%

total of 30 different packages

Fancy. Some of these get Arcanum, magical items in the vein of the portable hole and the Immovable Rod. The table you roll on to determine which Arcana you get is a d66 table so an even chance (2.8%) of getting any of the 36 Items.

As a Bonus here are the tables for the Alternative Character Groups. First up are the Mutants. They roll 1d20 for stats instead of 3d6 like regular Bastionites.

Mutants roll 1d20 for stats instead of 3d6 making for a really interesting table distribution. High likelyhood of High stats and poor equipment

Highest Attribute\HP	1-2 HP	3-4 HP	5-6HP
3-10	2.08%	2.08%	2.08%
11-13	3.87%	3.87%	3.87%
14-15	2.30%	2.30%	2.30%
16-17	3.43%	3.43%	3.43%
18-19	9.75%	9.75%	9.75%
20	3.09%	3.09%	3.09%

What a neat stat distribution. The probabilities of getting any one of these packages goes up and down and up and down. Of course the power balancing remains similar due to the actual design of the packages fitting in with the appropriate level of power but the variety of characters you’ll see is neat.

The Mutant table distribution is weird. Too weird for this sinful hateful world. I hear Krakoa is nice this time of year. But at least the mutations are mostly helpful and every mutant gets at least one from a d100 table. I even spot some of the x-men on this table.

Next are Simple Folk, people from the Deep Country where brawn matters for a lot more. This table only goes off of what your strength score is instead of what your best score is, but you get to roll 1d12+6 for your strength. is that better than 3d6? Looks like generally yes. your chances of a higher score are much better under this system.

Which would you rather use?

And your chances are a flat 1.38% chance of getting any one of the 33 results on the table. Kind of boring but also straightforward, Just like the characters. you only roll 2d6 for WILL as a Simple Folk. Ouch.

In addition to the standard equipment packages all the simple Folk get at least one sometimes more trinkets of a basic d100 table. Most of it is mundane but flavorful. Who wouldn’t want to roll a character who starts with Rolls Dice A bag of really heavy rocks?

As part of the Secret Jackalope I also mentioned a bonus for also giving me failed careers in the vein of Electric Bastionland. Each career gets some items just for having the career and then some additional items based on what they rolled for their HP and starting money (Each is a 1d6 table). in addition they each have sample names, a flavorful concept and a description of who the group is in debt to if that characters player is the youngest. It’s a lot of extra material. I would be very surprised to get this but just in case, here’s the probability table for you. It’s a total of 94 entries determined by matching your lowest and highest ability scores. 3d6 for each of the three. This one was a bit of a pain to calculate. Here’s the formula I used but the long list of tables this spits out is too long for inclusion here. Here’s the link to try it yourself. I think transpose view is the clearest way of viewing the output for this.

Getting Flashbacks to College

H\L	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12+
9-	0.04	0.10	0.20	0.30	0.36	0.37	0.23	X	X	X
10	0.08	0.23	0.43	0.64	0.79	0.82	0.63	0.38	X	X
11	0.17	0.48	0.91	1.35	1.67	1.73	1.34	0.81	0.38	X
12	0.27	0.8	1.49	2.22	2.75	2.85	2.2	1.34	0.63	0.23
13	0.35	1.03	1.93	2.87	3.55	3.69	2.85	1.73	0.82	0.36
14	0.34	0.99	1.86	2.76	3.42	3.55	2.75	1.67	0.79	0.36
15	0.27	0.80	1.50	2.23	2.76	2.87	2.22	1.35	0.64	0.34
16	0.19	0.54	1.01	1.50	1.86	1.93	1.49	0.91	0.43	0.20
17	0.10	0.29	0.54	0.80	0.99	1.03	0.80	0.48	0.23	0.10
18	0.03	0.10	0.19	0.27	0.34	0.35	0.27	0.17	0.08	0.04

Considering this is basically a fancy d100 list, a little over 1% should be considered “Average” For the Sake of getting this to fit I’ve left off the Percentage signs.

And know we know.