3d6 Closet Skeletons

 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...