July 2020 – Aboleth Overlords

Music to roll dice to: lookfar

full album on Dungeon Synth Archives youtube channel

It should be no surprise that I’m the kind of dork who loves the musical genre of dungeon synth. Really I love all kinds of music, but the overall tone and sound of most dungeon synth gels together for me to be a nice bit of ambiance to put on low volume in the background of a game, if everyone likes playing with music.

I recently stumbled on this album by lookfar, which seems to be the dungeon synth project name for Louie Zong, a really talented person.

This is becoming one of my favorite albums to put on while doing game prep, hacking system docs, typing up campaign ideas or reading fantasy books.

I’m not really a music critic but I love the specific effects that Louie has chosen, to me it really gives the music an otherworldly feel, and I really love the guitar work on songs like the Far Reaches to accompany the synth work.

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 3

Sunday was a continuation of the open table game I’ve been running on the OSR Pickup Server, and I had the pleasure of gaming with:

Barkface the Druid, played by EvilTables
Bolo the Illusionist, played by Misha
Donnie the Bard, played by Malley
Sky the Druid, played by John/Captain Caveman
Uriel the Ranger, played by Dante
Vermund Borgarsson the Barbarian (deceased), played by Graytung

Session Report Below

Failed Career: Herbalist

You get

A hand rake, one floppy hat, a small watering tin.

Why did you leave your job?

Tormented: Thinking you were ridding yourself of a garden-variety pest, you poisoned the pet mole of a particularly cantankerous gnome. They have since defiled your gardens and wilted your herbs whenever they could.
Haunted: When you were a child one of your village playmates drowned while you two were playing in a lake. You never told their parents, and for the past several years you have been seeing your friends face in the mounds of dirt where you go to pick herbs.
Allergies: You thought if you just searched long enough you would find the cure to the sneezing you suffer when encountering most roots and leaves. Unfortunately this never happened.
Assassin: Every time you went looking for new plants, you were always assaulted by murderous strands of sentient vines, intent on using your body for fertilizer.
Competition: A shroomfolk found their way to your village, and would offer spores of itself to the locals. It seemed to cure most ailments, and the being disdained being paid for its services, rendering you out of work.
Poisoned: Stuck by the thorn of a corpse-thistle, you were bed-ridden for several months. While fighting for your life, you called to one of the many goddess of gardens, and promised you’d pick flourishing vegetation no longer.

What did you take with you?

Amadou: A peculiar kind of fungus that catches flame quite easily. You have about 6 uses worth.
Cat’s Nip +1: You keep this in a tightly-sealed bottle, but when you sprinkle even a pinch of it, a dozen or so local cats will find their way to it, and nearly any feline will be rendered catatonic for nearly an hour after getting a taste. You have about ten pinches remaining.
Tacky Stalk: This woody reed contains a fibrous, chalky interior that may be chewed into a gummy mound. After a few minutes this mound will harden entirely, becoming a permanent adhesive after drying.
Artificial Flowers: You’re not completely sure what this is, but it seems to be a bouquet fashioned out of felt, wax, wire and other materials. It looks real as long as it is not closely observed, and is rather resplendent.
Seed Bomb x3: You have three dirt clods held together in small canvas sacks. Their contents will explode on impact, showering whatever they strike with dirt and a multitude of seeds, dizzying anyone struck, and with a bit of rain will produce a patch of wildflowers in a week or so.
Jovial Mandrake: A small root that looks somewhat like a tiny human. This being follows you about, telling you jokes and laughing in its shrill, high pitched voice. After spending months with the thing you’re not sure its so bad that you cannot speak Mandrake.

Inspired by Electric Bastionland, Knave, and Ten Foot Polemic.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 2

Yesterday I ran the second session of an open-table Barrowmaze game on the OSR Pickup server. Six gracious players joined me:

Aed the Thief, played by K_Moon
Barkface the Druid, played by EvilTables
Donnie the Bard, played by Malley
Nanko the Fighter (deceased), played by Graytung
Sky the Druid, played by John/Captain Caveman
Uriel the Ranger, played by Dante
Vermund Borgarsson the Barbarian, played by Graytung

Spoilers for Barrowmaze follows

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 1

Today was the first session of my open-table Barrowmaze game on the OSR Pickup server. I was honored to run for the following five players:

Dante, playing Uriel the Ranger
Hans, playing Heinrik the Thief
Jesse, playing Wangat the Magic-User
John, playing Sky the Druid
Malley, playing Donnie the Bard

Summary of session contains some barrowmaze spoliers

Gaming Update + Mapping Tools

Slow going on the blog front mostly because I have been prepping to run an online, open-table Barrowmaze game using Old School Essentials + Advanced Genre Rules. This is a roll-over another game I was running, also using OSE. This was initially set up to be an in-person open table game, but account of the whole Pandemic was shifted online right as we were getting ready to get together. Life stuff made it difficult to get the required number of players, so we chatted and decided to shift the game to the OSR Pickup Game Discord server, in the hopes of getting new players. We also decided to pitch a new game, as it seemed people were a tad shy joining an existing game that had been running for months now.

Most of my time has been spent mapping Barrowmaze. I have a few issues with mapping over voice, I find I spend a large portion of the time either mapping myself using Roll20’s terrible tools, or I force that on my players and then spend a significant amount of time checking and correcting maps. So I decided I would just map out Barrowmaze, which is no light endeavour.

I’ve tried three different tools to come up with the maps, all of which have their ups and downs.

Dungeondraft: This is by the developer of Wonderdraft, a highly regarded mapping software, except the focus on Dungeondraft is on the dungeons, obviously. It’s the most featureful of the tools I used, but its still in Alpha, meaning that its a pain to use. Frequently the application just hard quits, entire segments of walls disappear, random cave explosions appear on your map – its really, really frustrating. It also deleted one of my major map files, which would have lost hours of work had I not used version control.
Dungeon Scrawl: Probably the most aesthetically pleasing mapping software to me, this looks like it will be a great tool once its developed. But as of right now there’s no easy way to delete walls within a room, and to place in-room walls or stairs you have to unintuitively place them in “erase” mode. I also find that the “join rooms” option doesn’t operate on the principle of least surprise. It joins rooms only if you intrude upon one room. If you just place rooms adjacent to each other, it doesn’t actually join them. I’m waiting until this develops more before I look into it again.
Dnd Map Sketcher: Gorgeous isometric mapper written in Unity that also seems to want to be a VTT. Its fairly barebones at the moment, but looks great. Unfortunately for me while isometric maps look great for dungeons designed for them (check out all the Trilemma Adventures stuff, for example), they became extremely difficult to read for compact dungeons. Also since this does not have have a cave tool its doesn’t fit my use case.

I didn’t try any of the other standards, I ended up sinking too much time into Dungeondraft to justify it. Overall I can’t say I’m that happy with it, looking at the subreddit for the tool it seems the user base is more the kind of player who is looking for typical 5e set-piece encounters, instead of mapping out actual dungeons, but I do have my fingers crossed.

I am hoping to get back to the Failed Careers and my Gygax 75 setting once I have a session of this open table game under my belt, and I have been working on a few system hacks I want to playtest and put out there.