Night-Haunted Hogwarts: Downtime Draft

Belly up to the bar between adventures

 Josh of Rise Up Comus recently asked me if I had posted my Hogwarts downtime action rules and I said that I had put the the proof-of-concept version that I'd used in the playtest session report that I posted back in September. This, it turns out, was a lie. I referenced the downtime actions in the write-up but I didn't actually post the rules! Well, here they are:

Gallivespians, Twk-Men, and Tiny People

Kev Walker, Glen Elendra Archmage

 Arnold K’s most recent edition of his excellent monster manual, the MONSTROME, laid out some thoughts on sprites as tiny non-magical winged people. Miniature people are an immediately adventure-ready concept. It’s fun to think about how they would interact with a space, meet their needs, make common objects out of tiny things, interact with animals, and so on. In giving his sprites an interesting combat niche, Arnold seems to dial in on recreating Attack on Titan but with the roles reversed and the PCs in the position of the lumbering giants. In general I like this framework, because fighting a smart little wasp is cool. However, I really don’t care for Attack on Titan, and the model here recreates it too closely for my taste (why do the sprites’ neck razors target specifically the back of the neck on a human and not, say, the throat or ankles?). This got me thinking about other versions of these creature types in fiction, the Gallivespians of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the Twk-men of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth: why I like them, and what seems gameable about them.