3d6 Skeletons in a Closet

 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...

Most retroclones seem to use the same standard numbers for Leather (light), Chain (medium), and Plate (heavy) armor: 12, 14, and 16, respectfully, with unarmored foes counting as AC 10. There is one prominent exception I've noticed, which is Lamentations of the Flame Princess ( LotFP ). LotFP makes the default unarmored AC 12, and everything else adjusts accordingly (so, light armor is 14, medium armor is 16, and heavy armor is 18).  I found this counter-intuitive at first, but as I wondered on whether there's a good way to fix this. As I started exploring to-hit probabilities, I decided to make a comparison between four prominent old-school systems to get an idea of what the options are. I used three B/X retroclones - LotFP, Old-School Essentials (OSE) , and Labyrinth Lord ( LL ) - and one ODD clone , White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game ( WB)   I decided to see how different classes' chances to hit lightly and heavily armored enemies changes as they level up. ...

A year ago I began to experiment with different OSR systems to try and find my ideal form of playing. I'm hoping to eventually settle down on one or two base systems with a set of house rules that will accomplish my ideal style of play, that I can go back to from time to time.  I'll be keeping this post - my first post on this blog - as a place to keep track of different systems I try overtime and will try to update it regularly with new systems, and new thoughts and feeling on old ones.    Black Hack (light playing experience) Atrocious layout - have to constantly flip back and forth Roll under system is neato Usage die is great, will add that into other things now, especially for ammo - though seems hard to keep track of multiple usage dies Not in love with multi-attacks for fighter, but haven't played higher levels yet. Will have to see how that is in play The rule for Powerful Foes is tough to remember. I will have to see if I remember it next time, as it is crucia...