Category: Uncategorized

Some random Christmas theming for your game

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

It is snowing.

At the first crossroads

… the party meet St Nicholas (see picture). He is cheery on the surface but underneath he is seething, he has done nothing but give out gifts for thousands of years and has been sustained only by brandy and cookies.

He presents each PC with a present, each wrapped with string in bright, sturdy wax-paper:

  1. Brass bottle painted with a bright abstract design and the words “Henderson’s Excellent Temporary Tonic”. Makes you feel like you can do anything, that obstacles are just tissue paper, for an hour — have d6 temporary hp. Then it makes you feel like you can’t do anything at all for a second hour — have d6 temporary negative hp. (if you’re temporarily at zero or below, you’re basically useless for the period).
  2. Random spell scroll in an attractive leather case. (casts at user’s level)
  3. Leather-and-wood party popper that has the name of a random spell on the side – casts it when fired. Level 5 effect but targeting protocol is unclear to say the least.
  4. Handheld paper effigy of St Nick that’s full of something solid. On the back it says “Drive back the dead this festive season”. Has a fuse coming out of his head, and if you light it the whole thing burns for one turn and no undead below 4HD may bear being within 20ft.
  5. Disposable hand-cannon (30’ range 2d8 damage, one use only)
  6. A fluffy white kitten in a Santa hat. Quite clever and helpful but oh so very vulnerable.

He does not give hirelings or retainers anything — it turns out they have not been good.

He is accompanied by four

St Nicholas’ Reindeer — HD 2, AC 12, move 50ft fly 60ft, ML 8, bite d6

Much antlers, much fur, much… teeth and claws? Make a lot of mouth-sounds that are suspiciously like talking. If they are talking, they’re making a lot of insinuations and jibes. Will try to steal things and would quite like to eat you (but St Nicholas will stop them).

At each location

In every scene and/or encounter, roll d12 once on this to add Christmas flavour.

1d4 Christmas stockings, roll d6 for each:
1-3 d6*10 coins
4-5 d6*10 ordinary stones
6 Fat muscular worm with a face, Dex save or d3 bite damage		7A crashed (non-flying-type) sleigh. There the body of a sturdy farmer under the sleigh and wrapped gifts in the back. Gifts are consumer durables worth d6*20 coins but if you take any the farmer’s ghost will follow the PCs and harass them until they make amends.  
2Everything is candlelit, even if outside8Something ate a reindeer here. they did not eat it neatly and they left the bones behind
3It is particularly snowing now. Useful visibility is about 30ft.9St Nick is here too. “You again?”. He throws coal at you and a reindeer tries to steal a backpack.
4D3 more of those reindeer, as weird as the first time and with St Nick to rein them in10Children here, singing. They run away if you try to interact.
5A random magical treasure in a gift-wrapped box. It’s in the possession of any monster or NPC that’s here,11A nativity scene. The saviour is in the manger and the magi look on. Does it move when you’re not looking? Surely not.
6Holly tree at the focal point12A fat turkey gobbles about here. It’s wearing a little backpack containing sausagemeat, sage, breadcrumbs, and two onions.

Lunacantium — players overview

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

This is the blog post where I will keep an overview of Lunacantium, my current adventure design project. Lunacantium features briefly in A Broken Candle, as the late and lamented capital of Rocaine, but I’ve never developed it in detail until now.

Lunacantium will also be my project for #Dungeon23, which I intend to do for at least a single day. I’ll put a warning at the top of every post so that current or potential players don’t see the secrets and thus ruin their joy and horror of discovery in-game.

Lunacantium, in play, is an OSR-style city-megadungeon. For three hundred years it was the glory of the nation, perhaps of the world, and then a century ago it collapsed. What remains is a dangerous ruin surrounded by mile upon mile of unlivable wasteland.

For rules I’m using Architrave, my lightly-reworked version of Knave 1e. I’ll probably put it up here at some point. Some assumptions (e.g. the very particular spell list) will set it apart from other OSR games.

What kind of game do I run with it?

  • There is a pool of active players, there are game sessions as and when (GM availability is probably the main constraint), and there is a (ruined) city waiting to be explored.
  • There is no plot. The story is about some people who went into Lunacantium and things happened there..
  • By all means roleplay your character as you see them. But I’m not going to target your character’s stories by e.g. setting up events that challenge their beliefs — you’ll have to make your own stories using the world as you find it.
  • I won’t scale encounters to the party, and I won’t fudge die rolls to save you. You’ll need to learn about the city and its dangers, and make sound judgements.
    • NB there is no at-all-straightforward resurrection magic
  • I will, however, strive to make it possible to read situations, to learn the nature (and risk level) of different areas, and to know when you’re getting into real trouble.
  • I may fudge rules for speed of play, particularly near the end of a game session.
  • I’ll probably run this intermingled with other things for a good while, but at any time it could disappear or be replaced by something else.

Finally, a promotional flyer:

An Anki deck for OSE / BX D&D

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

I’ve created an Anki deck for some details of BX D&D, using OSE as my reference. I’ve only covered those things that I found difficult to remember, which I suspect are “those things where it differs from Lamentations of the Flame Princess and/or 3e or 5e”.

You can download it as a zip file here:

wrong_wax_ose_and_bx_anki_2022_09_18Download

(that includes a text file with all the cards, one per line)

The Bone Place of Dreib – out at DTRPG

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

I’ve just published my third adventure module — The Bone Place of Dreib. It’s currently $3 at DTRPG.

Back cover blurb:

“You are alone. It is dark. You have never read a book.

There is something in here with you.

On a hill above a deserted road there is a rocky crown, and in that crown is the Bone Place of Dreib, and in the Bone Place (so you have heard) is a temple of the ancients full of treasures wondrous and diverse. Why it is unlooted and undefiled? Probably the stories about the place, the ghosts that come if you sleep too close, and the list of grave-robbers who never came back.

But the stories are probably bullshit, the ghosts probably just nightmares, and the grave-robbers rank amateurs. You are don’t care about that shit.

And you have this dream every night. A dream that you are alone, that it is dark, and that you have never read a book. You are down there in the earth and there is something in there with you. It is a million years old and it is not your friend.”

It’s built using Old-School Essentials as the rules reference, and I’ve roughly tuned it for 3-4 PCs of 3rd to 4th level.

This one has been a haul — I was doing preparatory reading (on funerary rites and on the prehistoric world), working on it seriously (there are computer files) back in July, and had a playable sketch by the end of August, but the playtest-and-revision cycle took months. Largely this was the pandemic-related difficulty of getting people physically together (I have had it with online play). But now it is done. You can be the judge of whether it was worth it.

Examples of things that support Foreground Growth

~ robdalexander ~ 1 Comment

I’m currently into Chris McDowell’s idea of “Foreground Growth” — character change and advancement because of specific things that happened in play, with no metagame rules invovled. Partly this is because I’m running Electric Bastionland and thinking about running Cairn, and neither has traditional advancement rules. The problem is that it’s not always obvious how to make it happen — while XP and level and skill point and advancement systems guide you to use them, foreground growth is something that the GM has to support.

So I’ve started a list below of foreground growth opportunities, along with sources that say how to do this or that glisten with examples:

Here are, also, some examples of foreground growth that don’t fit into the above categories (thanks to Yochai Gal for pointing these out):

If you have more categories, or can point me to more good examples, please let me know in the comments and I will expand the above.

Zedeck Siew on the beauty in the OSR

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

Zedeck Siew just wrote a blog post that I really like. It captures what I, as well as him, see as the beauty in the OSR, and what has made it the centre-of-gravity of my gaming universe for years. Not the grognards obsessing over how Gygax ran things, not the fascist-adjacents and the abusers, but the people who embrace rpgs as their own genre and who bring their own weird everything into the game.

My favourite quote:

So, yes: Dark Souls and metal music. But also references weirder, personal, and as-yet-untapped: Zomia, punk zines, walks in backyard forests, Birkenhead folklore, the Permian Period, Moebius, East Malaysian myth – Composted together to the point they become game things utterly unlike anything else, and the stories / experiences you can have in those game things you can have nowhere else.

https://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/post/661198838065922049/sentimental-thoughts-about-the-osr

…but I’d recommend you read the whole thing. It’s not long.

The Bleak Holdfast of the Heartless Queen – out at DTRPG

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

I’ve just published my second adventure module — The Bleak Holdfast of the Heartless Queen. It’s currently $4 at DTRPG.

Back cover blurb:

“High above the snow line there is a castle on a crag. It is an object of fear and hatred, because the Heartless Queen holds court there and she is pitiless in her anger and host to terrible friends. Between the Frost Wyrms, the Ice Harpies, and the Frozen Thing that Guards the Bridge, even getting in is difficult.

Most locals stay as far away as they can, but between courage, pride, and burning vengeance there are always some willing to take a shot at it. And travellers from the soft, warm south might hear stories of the Queen’s fantastical treasures and be oblivious about the horrors that protect them.”

It’s built using Old-School Essentials as the rules reference, and I’ve roughly tuned it for 5-6 PCs of 3rd level or slightly fewer of 4th.

(added 26 April) Some prosaic notes for the prospective DM – the module features:

  • A 70  location adventure site with a complex multi-path (‘Jaquay’d’) layout
  • Several goals the PCs could have within that space
  • An unusual environment (a castle made largely of ice)
  • Several detailed NPCs, some of whom can be set against each other
  • Several distinctive creature and minor NPC types
  • An adversary roster to help you predict the castle’s response to disturbance

(if you’re intimidated by my recent productivity, it might help you to know that I’ve been working on this, and The Pit in the Forest, on and off since January 2020.)

I don’t like reading rpg books

~ robdalexander ~ Leave a comment

I value playing rpgs over reading rpgs, and that’s partly because I have very limited interest in doing the latter — reading most rpg books doesn’t feel like something that’s worth my time. Recently I’ve been thinking about why? Why don’t I enjoy this?

Primarily, it’s because I don’t have that much time I want to spend on reading. So I don’t need volume; I want impact. And by going to wider-interest books I can get:

  • Fiction that’s much better written (recent example — Gabrielle Squailia’s Viscera)
  • Non-fiction that’s of much greater value because it tells me about the real world (current example — Abulafia’s The Great Sea)

I.e. the payoffs are just much higher.

The Pit in the Forest – out at DTRPG

~ robdalexander ~ 1 Comment

I’ve just published my first actual adventure module — The Pit in the Forest. It’s currently $2 $3 on DTRPG.

Bryce quite likes it.

Back cover blurb:

In Claine Forest near Padduck Village there has appeared a pit. No-one knows where it came from, it just did. It is not so deep that you cannot see the bottom, but people fear it and avoid it. No-one who has climbed into it has come back, having been dragged beneath the surface by unseen hands.

A necromancer has come to the forest, seeking the pit. She does not quite know what she expects from it, but what she hopes for is protection from death.

It’s built for 5-6 PCs of levels 2-3, and to run under most OSR rulesets.