3d6 Closet Skeletons

 In my last Untamed Lands session, I ran into an expectedly unexpected turn of events: my players wandered off the path I had expected them to follow for the day, into hexes I had not yet finished detailing. That is to say, I knew what the hexes had in them roughly , but I hadn't finished fleshing them out.  Specifically, after yet another unsavory deal with the dust witch Majda (during which Majda got herself a vulture-headed creature to slay and use his organs for rituals; and the party got themselves an exploding potion of Sleep ), the party wandered into a border hex which, in truth, I didn't ever see my party entering. What reason have they to venture so far south, I wondered? I hadn't expected them to choose to follow a river downstream in hopes of finding a bridge, rather than simply crossing it by swimming (Note to self: when drawing rivers on your maps, consider where if at all, there are bridges to cross it). And so they happened onto a hex which had the following...

 My Untamed Lands campaign   - a bronze age, near-eastern inspired spin on Keep on the Borderlands - is officially underway. Our first proper session was a blast, and my first time running a hexcrawl since I was a kid. It was a lot of prep starting out, but wound up being fun to do.  This campaign has also offered me an opportunity to put into practice some thoughts I've had for years about how to better differentiate divine and arcane (or as I like to call, it, occult) magic. Our first session happened to put these issues right on the forefront. Session 1: A Deal With the Dust Witch 10th of Hadad - 12th of Hadad , Year 619 (After the Flood) After their first, violent introduction to the region in Session 0 , the party entered the Olamite outpost - only to find right at the entrance, hanging from a low tree - was the rotting corpse of a naked man with the the symbol of a sorcerer branded onto his forehead. The followers of Ninta do not tolerate dark magic, it seems. Luc...

My Untamed Lands campaign - a mini-campaign based on Keep on the Borderlands , but with a near-eastern, bronze age twist - is officially underway.  Just before character creation I came up with a pantheon of 13 gods, a 12-month calendar (each month corresponding to one god; with the progenitor god left unrepresented) - and 12 zodiac signs that players will be born under depending on their date of birth (randomly determined through die roll of course). Each sign has an ability associated with it. Here are the 13 signs and their associated dates:  ( the year begins in the spring, with Mawa, and ends in the winter with Ninta) 16 Mawa - 14 Dovrul: The Serpent Advantage when crafting/extracting/applying poisons (once per session) 15 Dovrul - 13 Lumat: The Lantern Can roll with advantage on a usage die roll (once per session) 14 Lumat - 12 Kamas - The Sphinx Can ask the judge one question about the...

  I haven't posted on here for a while - because I haven't played roleplaying games in a while. Real world responsibilities have caused me to put my Odd Jerusalem campaign on hold - only two sessions in.  But recently, while preparing to resume that old campaign, I've begun to run another campaign for a different, smaller group. As part of my ongoing project of becoming more intimately familiar with the OSR as I develop my own set of house rules, I've decided to run the classic Keep on the Borderlands - an adventure I've never actually played myself.  As soon as I started reading through the adventure, I knew that I want to take it in a sharply different direction though - I've grown incredibly tired of orcs and gobbos and bugbears and what have you. So I took a couple of buckets of ancient Canaanite literature, ancient Mesopotamian literature, tanakh (the "Old Testament" as the gentiles like to call it), sword & sorcery fiction, The Elder Scr...

 I am prepping a new campaign.The overarching concept of this world: Jerusalem, but different. Jerusalem as seen through a twisted carnival mirror: modern geography, but 19th century technology; recognizable structures and streets, but with fantastical elements and an atmosphere of decay and degeneration. The goal: to create a world that is both familiar and strange; recognizable, but wondrous; fantastical but uncanny (in the Freudian sense - Unheimliche).  The system will be Into the Odd, with some house rules. And one of those house rules will be backgrounds. I love backgrounds doubling as both a character's backstory and an actual game mechanic. Several games do this: FATE, most famously, but also 13th Age (where backgrounds replace skills, brilliantly), Tunnel Goons (where backgrounds determine stats) and The Black Hack (where one can use one's background once a session to roll with advantage on a check).  For my games, I will probably be snatching the Black Hack's m...

This week I ran a party of players through their second session exploring the  Tomb of the Serpent Kings.  I used Fantastic Medieval Campaigns Basic by Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy to run it - and have already run it in the past for a different group of players using White Box: Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game. The session went in a very unexpected direction, and sent my thoughts spinning in several different directions - so I thought I'd go over some of them here.   "He Who Fights Monsters..." Tomb of the Serpent Kings is a great adventure, that manages to make even a supposedly trad (and "introductory") dungeon crawl interesting by building upon the complexity and strangeness of the dungeon the deeper you go, and by offering a bunch of divergent paths and different experiences to be had - from mummified hands bursting out of a pool, through fungus goblins that might declare you their king and then sacrifice you, to a basilisk in a dungeon intended for firs...