3d6 Skeletons in a Closet

 I stopped updating here last year because of some personal stuff. My old campaign came to a halt partially because of that and I've only recently resumed gaming, running a Mausritter campaign for some colleagues at work (which I shall perhaps discuss on here another time) - and now, a campaign using Knave 2 , that I call  JUNGLELAND!  Welcome to Ixal, the sunken continent. Just over a century ago it rose out of the oceans, a mass of sprawling jungles, strange coral forests, and ancient ruins of a long lost civilizations. Since then it has drawn countless explorers - and continues to inspire invention and discovery.  That was the flavor text I sent my friends to try and get them interested in the campaign. The concept is simple: a strange new tropical continent that housed a highly advanced civilization tens of thousands of years ago, but that is now largely unpopulated (at least not by humans) draws colonists, scholars and religious fanatics, none of whom fully gra...

  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...