Aboleth Overlords

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 13

Summary

The party explores a mound further east atop the marsh, discovering a secret entrance further into the maze below. There the battle with gigantic centipedes, the unquiet dead of necrotic priests, and hear the howling of an unearthly wolf deep within the tomb.

session report follows

Odd ReDuel – Techniques

A few years ago I made a post about a dueling system I was using to run a less abstract, tactical version of Torchbearer/MouseGuard’s rock-paper-scissors conflict resolution. So very much not in line with the stuff I have been posting about recently, but if you find a set of rules that add fun to your game, include it. This is definitely verbose, but sometimes I have fun with very crunchy mechanisms once and a while. While at the time I wrote this “for” Into the Odd (because thats what I was running) this could obviously be used in many old school or adjacent systems.

So while I still would run a majority of combats closer to freeform, sometimes its fun to have the suspense of flipping over a card to find out your opponent has blocked when you feinted. This can be a fun minigame for knightly duels between a player character and their hated rival, or even maybe a system to throw into a small miniatures game to play out a fencing bout between generals. I definitely wouldn’t break this out for every single combat (if you could model them with roughly Into the Odd stats).

Summary

A wanderer joins the party as the group continues to explore the mysterious crypt below, dismantling a trap, accessing the center of the sunken labyrinth, and finding a horror within.

hard to find the exact image of what the crypt looks like, picture this but more cluttered with ancient debris

session report follows

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 12

edit: I accidentally listed Gamdar as dead when I meant Garbash, too many G clerics – this has been corrected below

Summary

Our group acquires some new allies, returns to the tomb, leaps over some fire beetles, suffers loses, and finds the hidden sarcophagus of an ancient druid.

session report follows

Failed Career: Mariner

You get

A heavily knotted rope, a hooked push pole.

Why is it hard to get you to step on a boat?

Abandonment: The deal you made with the merfolk to marry one of their own in exchange for sea-riches turned out to be a double disaster – the riches was just a decade supply of pungent kelp, and your betrothed was a ravenous deep one. Leaving a fish beast at the alter is slight the sea shan’t soon forgive.
Disfigurement: Deciding that two peg legs are enough, you’ll try your lot on land.
Fired: Your cantankerous shanties were decreed a nuisance, and your constant chugging of rum despite your penchant for sea sickness had fired from your position on the ship – literally, as your captain stuffed you into the cannon and launched you onto the nearest shore.
Cursed: Ever since you decided to use gulls as target practice you’ve felt that the sea itself had it out for you. Constantly toss overboard by storm, harassed by sharks, even once an octopus climbed aboard simply to attempt strangling you, you feel keeping your distance from water is for the best.
Jonahesque: Your ship smashed and you swallowed whole by a leviathan, you became accustomed to the horrors of the dark as you traversed the belly of the beast. Only by joining a party of a wood golem, a miniature thri-keen and a wizened craftsman were you able to make your escape.
Change: You just found yourself tired of the constant rocking of waves, fish, and the salty air, you decided stable ground would be far more adventurous than long months on a urchin-crusted vessel.

What memento do you carry with you?

Clam of Devouring: A small mollusk with a serious appetite, this shelled creature will clamp down on anything you it can get its shell around. It will then, extremely slowly, begin to digest whatever it has caught.
Sea Monkey: Despite appearing as a flask of salt-water, when splashed the watery contents transforms into an only moderately-disobedient monkey, who desperately doesn’t not want to be reconfined to its vessel.
Boat Terrorizing Flag: A black flag you stole off of a notorious pirate ship, this flag allows you to turn boats as a cleric turns undead.
Eye-Patch of Night Seeing: This mystical eyepiece gifts you minor low-light vision, at the cost of your depth-perception.
Land Remora: Not entirely clear how this fish survives outside of water, this being wriggles all around your body nibbling at crumbs, flakes of dried skin, loose threads that you have.
First Mate: A not particularly bright sailor from your marine days follows you around as long as they are fed, providing low quality manual labor and high quality commentary on all of your mistakes.

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

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

Nausicaä FKR Session 2

Summary

The group sets out in search of a Torumekian plane downed in the Sea of Corruption, meeting Worm Handlers and a lost little girl, and discovering an ancient crypt from the days before.

session follows

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 11

Summary

The players gain two new allies, traverse more of the maze, engage in a brief chase, and meet a skeleton that doesn’t quite understand its unliving condition.

session report follows

Nausicaä FKR Setup & Session 1

Since FKR style play is getting more attention I thought it would be a good time to pitch an open table game using my Primeval 2D6 system over on one of the Discord servers devoted to the style.

I met up with other members and pitched a few games – running a West Marches style game, an investigative horror game, an Ars Magica-alike, as well as a game set in Hayao Miyazaki’s setting where the Nausicaä manga takes place.

Almost everyone immediately expressed interest in Nausicaä being their top pick, so we started discussing the game, potential places to play, character ideas, and we landed on playing somewhere out “off the map” so to speak in our own corner of the world, making it easier for players to drop in and out without knowing the plot, as well as letting us handwave a lot of details.

I should preface this and probably every session that I am notoriously anti-canon. I want to draw on the imagery, themes, and broad-level assumptions of any source I’m using – Nausicaä included. So if something contradicts established lore – that’s the canon of our game. This is by no means to disrespect the source material, the creators, or the fans, but rather to allow our table to celebrate the world in the way that’s the most fun for us.

chargen and session follows

Barrowmaze Open Table Session 10

Summary

The party explores a number of tombs over the Barrowmaze, and take heavy losses.

Player characters

Donnie the Bard, played by Malley
Grick the Half-Orc, played by Modest Mace
Sky the Druid, played by Captain Caveman
Ulrik Ironsworn the Paladin, played by Isaiah
Uriel the Ranger, played by Dante

Hirelings

Arnd the Dwarf
Bran the failed magician
Garbash, Cleric of Crom
Irya the Archer
Manks, Cleric of Hathor

report follows

Less Rules To Do More: Advancement

Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.