YSYP Cottonmouth Ashcan (GLÅUGUST 2026 #5)

Taking on The Nothic's Eye GLÅUGUST 2026, challenge #5 is from a list by Doc - "Cottonmouth your pet system so it is synonymous with one of your settings. Here is what Cottonmouth is and here is one way you could do that"

For this I am attempting to crank over the entire system for Your Sector, Your Problem. It gnaws at me but I think the attempt to Cottonmouth it might force it to a useful place. You could probably retool the guts of this to be a minion-running mechanic for any domain level game. The 'cottonmouth' aspect of it is that the gears and gubbins are all just set up for the 'telling of the tale' debriefing which is happening in world (assuming you survive).

Four things happen during a cycle of play
1. You learn what problems you have in your sector, as per the name
2. You throw your assets at the threat, hopefully suitable ones against your various threats
3. Resolve the problems (or fail to)
4. Recover and maintain your assets - and then debrief on how the whole mission cycle played out.

Phase 1 - for this ashcan your problem is going to be selected with three rolls d12+8 off this d20 sector defense assets table to get three problems.

Phase 2 - you have your starter set of assets - three d20 rolls on the table and assign them against whichever problem you like. Each of your players draws two standard playing cards.
Ace, 2 = Exhaustion
3, 4 = Panic & miscommunication
5+ Hearts = Xeno-shock
5+ Diamonds = Inexplicable Physics
5+ Clubs = Bureaucracy & Bad Planning
5+ Spades = Gear Failure

Phase 3 - Decide whether or not to get involved, add a d6 if a player deploys with an asset and risks death. Roll off between problem and asset.
+4 success, no upkeep
+0 success, upkeep (draw 1)
-4 success, high upkeep (draw 2)
-5 or lower, failure, high upkeep (draw 2)

At this point draw cards from a standard deck for each asset as required by the rolls.

Phase 4 - upkeep - each character can get involved with an asset and play one of their cards. Multiple characters can go after one asset. If the total value of their cards (Jack = 11, Queen = 12, King = 13) is greater than card on the asset, take that card of the asset. Then tell the story of how it all played out, framed as your debriefing to the rest of the characters after everything has been resolved. That debrief has to include
What the asset is
The problem (card on the asset being targetted)
What caused the problem (the threat that put the cards there)
The character(s) involved in fixing the problem.

Do this for all assets. With luck, you have cards in hand that total more than the cards on your assets - just tell the tale of how you fixed it.

If the total of the characters cards do not exceed the value of the problems, characters can roll a save for that category (e.g. Inexplicable Physics) modified by the gap between the cards you have and the problem. Fail and take d6 points distributed across your Grit, Guile and Charm stats.Make the save with disadvantage if you play a card of a different type as the problem.

However that plays out, you still must tell the tale as a debriefing as above with the added element of:
How the character got beaten up doing it
Any remaining problems on the asset

Any assets that go into the next round with cards on them, they lose a dice from what they roll per card remaining.

Characters in this conceptualisation have 3d6 stats (Grit, Guile, Charm) and saves that base of those stats, modified by their 'career' tied either to humans, aliens or terrain, affecting people or stuff. Players could eat a few 'I have no cards, I get stuck in' at d6 damage a pop but not over the long haul.

Design notes

Key revelation, thanks to the in-house testing team, is not to frame this as 'grading roleplaying' but more as assembling the elements that have to be incorporated into an 'upkeep vignette' somewhat like a small round of 'Once Upon a Time'. I think it captures the fun of 'minion running' and the chaos involved in explaining why this xenoarchaeologist (holder of the right cards) was able to fix the BOGEYMAN cybertanks Gear Failure problem caused by their scrap with the Dubious Alien Mercenaries.

I like this better as a 'just tell the tale' rather than 'you must 'win' a roleplaying encounter'. Is this properly Cottonmouthed? Barely - I think in making it a 'talk through how you fixed it' it adheres to the in-world concept of your are troubleshooters dealing with wild things and debriefing your fellows at a particularly bizarre set of .

Your Sector, Your Problem - a setting told in saves

Considering how to express the setting of "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) through saving throws as conceived by Rise Up Comus in Worldbuilding through Saving Throws.

I like the idea a lot - the list of saves you have tells of the hazards you expect to face in this universe - and that can speak eloquently right there on the character sheet.

The key question to me is where to draw the line between attributes and saves, why not have just one or the other? I like the idea of fewer attributes to keep things simple complemented by a range of saves which show distinction between archetypes. Attributes are things that get used all the time but saves should be infrequent and, conceptually, represent how this character is special and has avoided a problem that would have caught out most people.

My current working thoughts are three attributes - grit, guile and charm. Thinking of these folk as probably existing within an environment with exo-skeletons and other means to physically move things and spending a lot of their time working at terminals and through comms lines, the physical side of things gets backgrounded, the mental side of things foregrounded.

If we assume this is a GLoG-like D&D hack, grit subs for Con and Wis, guile for Dex and Int, charm for Cha.

With those as the base attributes then, what are the saves? After looking at what causes project failures my thoughts are

Save vs
Bureacracy & Bad Planning
Xeno-shock
Inexplicable physics
Gear Failure
Panic & miscommunication

Definitions for these

Bureacracy & Bad Planning - foresight and organisation related questions, the sixth sense to check all the interpersonnel interfaces and confirm yes, someone did indeed get us flight clearance for that no-fly zone, etc.

Xeno-shock - so many aliens, with their smells and their threatening darting motions, their cacophony of sound your translator is struggling with, the mind-bending imagery etched on the walls, the implications, the implications...

Inexplicable physics - sufficiently advanced technology seems magical, logic apparently has no place here but we have to go anyway.

Gear Failure - did you check your seals? Did maintenance? Is that carabiner load-tested for this exo-suit? Is the shuttle scanner resolution good enough to pick you up from this debris field?

Panic - don't.

How it works

If we think of the categories of dealing with things as humans, aliens, stuff - any alien oriented character is going to have better Xeno-shock and Inexplicable Physics saves. Human oriented will have better Bureaucracy & Bad Planning saves. Stuff oriented will have better Gear Failure saves.

This all sits on top of assumptions of what chassis we are using in the first place, which I think is a GLoG-like, for the characters:
A few attributes
A bunch of saves
Traits/Feats for skills etc.

And then the background elements are trait/tag-based to minimise the crunch and crunch-optimisation sides of things, keep this focussed on the character and relationship side of things.

Your Sector, Your Problem - wheres my motivation?

Thinking on "Your Sector, Your Problem" (SHIELD/Stargate Command but responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds) in particular in the light of Uncanny Spheres MEGACORP: The Evil Mothership Campaign - why not just use that?

Uncanny Spheres portrays the dark mirror version of Mothership, scheming executives within the iconic megacorporations of that setting - and there is a ton of material there that I think I could wrangle but the 'close, but not quite' sense I get is really helpful to clarify what I am trying to get at with Your Sector, Your Problem.

The high-level pitch in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' was "you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of Sector Defense Assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those."

The key difference with MEGACORP as I think about it is that even though you are representing a very large entity, an interstellar megacorp, the problems you are dealing with are greater still, so your margin for the kind of back-stabbing and internal politics that MEGACORP foregrounds is less. Not zero, but less. YSYP is like domain management on a dangerous frontier, with potentially hostile residents and unknown buried problems within your realm.

My vision for the setting is a Banksian one or "portal fantasy in spaaaace" - lots of aliens out there, not necessarily all hostile but certainly humans are only small fish in what has turned out to be a very, very big, very inhabited pond.

Core Gameplay Loop for Sector Defense Game

Pondering on how to run "Your Sector, Your Problem" - "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds" - it lurks in my mind like a splinter.

Questions I have been having are 'what exactly is the fun here', 'why is this not a board game',and then 'what is the minimum viable game to get going'. I have written about this before in 'DIO - Cosmic Defense Brigade' and d20 Sector Defense Assets - the high concept is that you are responsible for holding down a sector your corporation has newly acquired protectorship of and have a scarce amount of assets of varying levels of effectiveness and you have to deal with all the problems that come across your desk with those.

Looking at the first of the questions - 'what exactly is the fun here?' - the core gameplay loop I have in mind is:
- "spot the problems" - gather info, figure out what is going on across your sector
- deploy your resources - typically not enough for easy answers
- resolve incidents
- recover/maintain your resources

d20 Sector Defense Assets

Following up on this Cosmic Defense Brigade I had ideas of a system for domain defense on a stellar scale.

As mentioned, no-one told you all the problems, you got volun-told to take charge here. You arrived to find a bunch of dossiers on your desk - your options in the case of things going wrong.

I have an idea - back in a previous life I would have called it the widget to hang a Con game on, now I'll call it a bolt on rules module.The idea cycles back to my previous DIO - your sector, your problem campaign. The player may or may not have combat capabilities but they certainly have command and control.

Inspired by the opening cinematic of the Space Marine game

D.I.O. Cosmic Defense Brigade

Calling back again to the Do It Ourselves prod by the Grumpy Wizard I wanted to sketch out the sci-fi campaign I would love to either play in or run.

High concept for this campaign springs from Iain M. Banks Algebraist - in that there is a thread of interstellar civilization that sees military defense as a thing like the fire brigade. Humans have stumbled to the stars into the midst of this and through the arcana of ancient opaque interstellar governance processes bid for a bunch of star systems. The humans understood they were taking over the systems. The galactics understood they were just taking over responsibility for those systems. The humans won the bids because noone else wanted the hassle. You are some of those humans.

The pitch is "SHIELD or Stargate Command but you are responsible for a sector of inhabited alien worlds". Throw in some Babylon 5 but the aliens are not bothering to come and talk to you.

Blog challenge: Worlds not Rules from Classless Kobolds

Picking up an interesting challenge from Jim at d66 Classless Kobolds which goes:
1. Pick a genre, setting, or time period
2. Write one or two paragraphs on context
3. Produce one page of random tables
4. Give advice on tropes and how to use them

So here is a thought I had kicking about for a while - portal-fantasy in spaaaaace.

The aliens do not care. There was a brief flash of attention when the war front passed near Earth before that all got quelled. Unfortunately humans escaped their world but they have nothing worth trading and their planet is a mess so ... *six shouldered shrug*

The time is the medium-distance future and our setting is an update on the planetary romance; you can go almost anywhere, walk under the distant suns, and so on as long as you spike your nano-treatments. All the different aliens are out there living their own paradigms and you can walk through the portal networks between them. In places it looks like Mos Eisley or Kill Six Billion Demons, other places it looks like Coruscant or Illium.

Something happened long ago and galactic civilization, such as it is, is jumpy as hell about backups and redundancy. They have portals you can walk through, portals with trains, they fly light-sails, they use habitats, they use generation ships, they use jump drives. They thread the crusts of worlds with bio-engines that can manufacture anything, then leave them mostly dormant.