Posts

Showing posts from 2016

New Monster: The Org

Image
Here's a story from my gaming youth. My mom was a big fan of Blackleaf. When I was young, my mom, influenced by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, forbade me from playing D&D. Thus, while I had been introduced to the game years before by watching my brother play, I actually cut my RPG teeth on Top Secret and I.C.E.'s Middle Earth Roleplaying Game . The guy who sort of reintroduced me to the original RPG or, rather, the Second Edition of the Advanced version of the original RPG, was my cousin. I spent a couple of long weekends at his house in Minnesota one summer, and he showed my all his kick-ass AD&D books. My favorites were the Monstrous Compendiums, these huge white binders full of loose-leaf monsters. Something about these badies grabbed my imagination, particularly their often lengthy ecology entries. Looking back on it now, these writeups were often a combination of too serious and too stupid to be very useful at the gaming table, but to my young eyes they

New Campaign: Explanation

Image
As I mentioned before, I'm a full-time nontraditional college student. That means, in a nutshell, that I don't have enough time to worry about the fact that I'm too old to be in college. One thing that I can't help but do is mine my classes for RPG ideas. The following is my brief pitch for what this campaign is going to be about. I'm not going to bother calling out all the historic and literary references that inspired these ideas, except in the broadest sense. They should, for the most part, be readily apparent, as I'm not trying to write the great American novel here, just tap into the same fertile ground that has inspired fantasy RPGs since their creation. What follows is my stream-of-consciousness thoughts on the campaign. While I do have rules to back most of this up, that will have to wait for a future post.  Basic Premise The campaign takes place in Brynland, a snowy land of war-like tribes who live on the outskirts of the Ludal Empire. A generatio

New Campaign: Beowulf on the Borderlands

Image
Beowulf of the Borderlands is a working title for a campaign I'm currently prepping using Swords & Wizardry White Box . I've always had this idea in the back of my head of building a campaign to run with my kids, plus anyone else who happens to be around and up for a game of D&D. The idea would be to make a pretty standard D&D setup: A central dungeon and a small wilderness area around it. The campaign would start out bare bones but would gain detail over time as the kids explored and made their own impact on the world. Ideally, in ten years or so, I'd have this binder containing a full dungeon and campaign fleshed out by actual play via my kids and I. Sort of a D&D-geek family heirloom. Pictured: Prop Heirloom My biggest struggle was choosing what version of D&D to run. I have a spiral bound edition of B/X that I put together myself, a hardcover of the Rules Cyclopedia , and just about every retroclone in either print or PDF format. Pl

Mutant Crawl Classics inspired patron for DCC: The Star Child

Image
The Mutant Crawl Classics Kickstarter is winding down to its final days. Using the free rules found here , I ran the Free RPG Day Funnel adventure Museum at the End of Time . Inspired by events that are very likely to occur within that adventure (and happened in my home game with the kids), I designed a new patron usable for DCC. Just a little something to tide you all over while you wait for the MCC game to release next year. Feel free to use, share, or whatever. I welcome feedback and would love to know if anyone actually makes use of this thing. PATRON: THE STAR CHILD Somewhere across the infinite realms of time, space, and possibility, there stands the greatest possible achievement of architectural design: a monolithic solid whose perfect and precise dimensions exist in a ratio utterly pleasing to the cosmos itself. Not only are the monolith’s height, width, and depth in perfect harmony with the divine ratio, but so too are its invisible dimensions, on into