Author: Justin Hamilton

Gods’ Isle Brainstorming

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City DLC – Beating Slave Knight Gael ...

For thousands of years the Gods reigned. Having formed creation out of the primal waters of chaos, breathing life into mankind, and blessing us with their gifts they ruled over use for a multitude of generations, a true golden age.

As the years waned on the Gods bestowed upon us civilization and the rights of kingship. They showed us how to conquer the wilds, build tools, raise cities, and even how to shape reality with powerful magics. After fostering us the Gods departed for their home, a gleaming city on the Isle in the Center of the World.

Mankind gave thanks to the Gods in the form of offerings, and would send their dead in boats to live out the afterlife with their Creators.

But something changed eons after their departure. The sun hung low and red in the sky, and the moon slowly faded into the black of night. The dead were found listing the coasts in the wasted vessels they were sent out upon. Those few that retained any semblance of speech told of a massive, tarnished city hidden in the fog. No gods found in attendance, only ravenous ghosts.

After the dead returned, so did the first adversaries. A multitude of beings whom the gods wrestled and bound, the unmakers of reality tore through fissures in the veil, setting themselves upon humankind.

City after city fell the unearthly incursions, and those from within who believed us lost in our ways, deserving of damnation. You are one of the many sent on an arduous voyage, to find the gods and plead for their aid, or to find the tools they used against the demons in the time before humankind.

Primeval d6 Rough Draft

I’ve been getting more and more into what people are calling “pre-D&D” or Ancient School Roleplaying, basically something along the lines of Braunstein and Blackmoor.

If you want a primer on the details I recommend Norbert Matausch’s excellent Play Worlds Not Rules series.

I’ve seen several systems in this style, three of my favorites are:

I love all of these, and have even ran a two hour one shot of Landshut in Hyboria that was a lot of fun. Like any tinkering geek I have my own way of running this style of game, which I am currently calling “Primeval d6.”

I want to put together a standalone pdf of my rules, but I wanted to type up the current working set as I think about what I would add or take away.

Primeval d6 Below

Quick Update

I’ve ran quite a few sessions of my Doomed Reach game. While been a lot of fun, the only downside is that the player scheduling portion of the setup hasn’t been too successful. Initially people jumped on gaming slots, but as this progressed it kind of became a situation where I started prodding certain players, so it essentially devolved into a traditional game, only with a lot of players and a lot of open threads.

I also ran Winter’s Daughter using Old School Essentials for friends and coworkers. This was a lot of fun, and I would like to write up what I recall of the actual play.

On Sundays I have been running an open table game using Old School Essentials, we’ve started with Winter’s Daughter and have played through three sessions. I think the group is almost finished with that particular dungeon, so I will be interested to see where it goes from here.

I have also been bitten yet again by the Glorantha bug, and am trying to find a game of RuneQuest or HeroQuest online. If I don’t soon I may have to run RuneQuest, but I am not sure if that will be too many games for me.

Doomed Reach

I have started running a West Marches-styled game over Discord/Roll20 named “The Doomed Reach.” This came about mostly because of my move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and wanting to stay in touch with many of my gaming groups, both face-to-face as well as online.

So far we have done two character creation sessions with supplemental world building. I spent a few weeks coming up with a hex map, adding materials to it, building a little bit of lore, etc. But I also wanted the players to have some input into the setting.

Obviously with something like a West Marches, the content requirement prevents players from being able to ad-hoc add tons of material in (or at least, it prevents it in terms of my preferences), so I used the system from Beyond the Wall’s Further Afield – players get to add a feature from a random table, and then other players get to embellish on the detail. All of this is delivered in-character, and the Referee rolls in secret how accurate their description is.

So this allows players to add new stuff to the setting, and I get to keep the tied together bits of dungeons and lore that I want. I intend to run this setting relatively anti-canon – one player decided to play a Kobold, and while I told him I’d prefer if he played a dog-kobold, he could do whatever. I fully intend to lean on him for all things Kobold related. Equally a player decided she had been swept up by missionaries who had deemed her cursed and sinful, and now she walks away wondering the reach of the religion that raised her – that player is going to be my main source of info for that sort of religion.

I’ll be posting some lore details and session reports as they come, right now I have a bunch of material I need to prep for the first actual adventuring session.

World of Dungeons Skill Hack

World of Dungeons is a great game by John Harper, kind of a demake of Dungeon World. Even if you’re not really into story game-ish mechanics, World of Dungeons does a lot of fun things, I’m especially fond of its magic system, where Wizards are abusing quicksilver and binding spirits to do their bidding.

One thing I do not like, however, is the skill system. World of Dungeons operates on a 2d6 roll, often plus or minus a small number based on an appropriate attribute. Results of a 6 or less is a total failure, 7-9 is a complication where you sort of get what your character wanted at a cost, and 10 plus is a total success.

When you are rolling and have a relevant skill trained you can never failure. What is suggested is that the character suffers the mixed complication, but one that is worse than had they rolled a 7-9. I feel this is annoying on several levels.

One is just that I feel completely removing the chance for failure is thematically unaligned with the source material. I feel that it removes the possibility for a style of GMing that I am partial to – where even if there is a small minute sliver of a chance of a character succeeding, they get a shot at rolling. Why this is removed is because I now have to grant a partial success to someone with a relevant skill no matter how crazy or incredulous the situation is.

The other aspect of the skill system that particularly bothers me is that it adds a conditional fourth tier of resolution. Not only do I have to be able to think up (or ask for) complications on the fly, but then I also have to be able to twist them ever so slightly. There is no guidance for how to accomplish this. This ALWAYS slows down my game.

I do not run a ton of World of Dungeons any more, but I think when I do next I will just house rule skills to roll 3d6, dropping the lowest result. This gives the character a benefit for taking the skill, while still keeping the chance of failure present.

Let me know what you think of this or your experiences or thoughts working with skills in World of Dungeons.

Zothique Inspirations

Zothique cover

Zothique is a collection of short stories by pulp maestro Clark Ashton Smith. It covers a far-future Earth where most of the continents have fallen under the ocean, some lands have risen again to be reforged into new landmasses, and magic and fantastical creatures live again.

It’s one of the foundational series of stories for the Dying Earth genre, supposedly inspiring Jack Vance to write his take on the genre years later. While it is not one of the works that appears on Appendix N many people consider Smith’s exclusion as a major oversight, or due to some amount of distaste for Smith’s more racy subject matter.

As an amazing work of fantasy, lets use some of the occurrences from these stories as an inspirational encounter table for old school fantasy gaming:

Zothique-influenced Encounters:

  1. A group of travelers, escorting a young bride for a king.
  2. Severed body parts, crawling around in the wilderness.
  3. Gargantuan skeletons, wearing turbans of snakes.
  4. Necromancers-in-exile, riding skeletal steeds with undead servants in tow.
  5. A eerie glowing orb, floating in the air, disintegrating dead flesh on contact.
  6. A vampiric ferret, the familiar of a grim wizard.
  7. A prince on the hunt of a rare quarry.
  8. Jackal-faced ghouls.
  9. A world-weary poet, seeking excitement that will bring them to the brink of death.
  10. A crestfallen lamia, guarding a tomb.
  11. An astrologer, being guided on a quest by a mythical creature.
  12. A massive swirling darkness surrounding the party, with the sounds of cackling demons within.
  13. Massive plants with human parts spliced onto them.
  14. The statue of a dark god, wielding a massive weapon, whispering pacts.
  15. Sentient bird nobles.
  16. A deep sea current, abducting ships to a grim isle.
  17. Swarming mass of crabs.
  18. Cultists of the charnel god, pursuing grave robbers.
  19. A rival adventuring party, looking for the relics in tombs.
  20. A city-state participating in the funeral of a noble by participating in city-wide debauchery.

RPGaDay 2019: Day 13 (Mystery)

So far I have only really found 2 mystery games that I enjoy: Cthulhu Dark and Bluebeard’s Bride. I really want to try more games in the Gumshoe system, but I bounced hard off of Trail of Cthulhu when I played it once years ago.

There’s obvious issues where you cannot hide information behind rolls. But its also fairly hard to to even conduct a mystery where you hand out all of the clues. If you need to know the places to go and people to talk to, it still often turns into a game of “What is the GM thinking?”

I would really love to see more OSR mystery games, as they tend to toy around with basic role playing assumptions in ways that a lot of games do not.

Roll Under Skill System Hack

This takes your basic roll-under attribute check, a discrete skill list, and the basic idea from something like RuneQuest to make a system where every class can advance in skills.

Initial Skills

Take the Lamentations skills, or any other series of skills you want and set them to 0.

Rolling Skills

Any time the referee calls for a skill check roll a d20 under the appropriate attribute (which can change depending on the situation) plus the value in a particular skill.

If you get under this value, you succeed. If not, you fail and place a mark near the skill.

Advancing Skills

When you level up look over your sheet and choose up to three skills to attempt to advance. Roll a d6 and try to roll equal to or over the current skill ranking plus the number of marks next to the skill. If you do so, you advance the skill – improve the skill value by 1.

After you have attempted to advance at least three skills, erase all of the marks.

Justification

This allows anyone to advance in skills, which can be useful if you are not playing with some thief equivalent, or want everyone to be able to learn skills without having to figure out multi-classing.

This also binds the skills to a somewhat reasonable level, making it unlikely for any one in particular to contribute too much over the course of a campaign.