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Showing posts from 2018

Small Cuts

Part of the greatness in OSR lies in how the PCs change over their harrowing adventures, this can take place in many ways, especially the wounds that the PCs endure. Some really great systems implement wounds, such as the up-and-coming  Electric Bastionland . Studying these systems, I've realized that so far that I have no mechanical rules for longer lasting wounds aside from the stuff that Into The Odd gives you upfront. I think it might be my duty to my players to make my game more lasting and weird, adding injuries won't necessarily cut anything away from the game. Except for many PC's limbs, that is. Now the hero cries in vain.  (Selkie Inguene) So, basically how I plan to do this is to make different small tables for different damage types of damage. Whenever the PCs take critical damage  (for those of you who don't play Into The Odd, this means that they fail a STR save when damaged), they will roll 1D6 on the table corresponding to the damage type. The t

Just Happy Little Accidents

Magic is almost always a gambit. A magic-user's limit should be how many spells they can SAFELY  cast before the tides of chaos bring them down. Arcanum in Into The Odd are really great, and I love the rules as a whole, but the system lacks miscasting. The closest thing that it has to miscasts is a brief blurb about how some arcanum can have side effects (such as cursed items, but these are a tad  different from miscasts) and identifying arcanum (when characters pick up arcanum, they can sense its nature but not its specific power. Also they must pass a WIL save to understand its power before using the arcanum at first, if they fail then the arcanum accidentally activates) which are all good, but not the miscasts I'm looking for. Into The Odd lists three example "types" of arcanum, "big arcanum" (REALLY big stuff, like magic couches), "disposable arcanum" (potions, bombs, you get the idea), and "arcanum weapons" (arcanum that are weapon

Odd Bosses

Hey, I'm back from school, which means I can post things again! I have recently been running a dungeon (basically just a complete butcher job and hack of Tomb Of The Serpent Kings  with ancient Greek themes, eldritch fish-people, sirens, suitors, and fleshy abominations. The dungeon is great for my newbie players) that has a few "bosses" in it. Bosses kinda go against OSR design in general if done wrong, such as forced fights against a big bad. Nonetheless, I still love boss fights because they offer a nice break from dungeon-delving along with a new obstacle to deal with. I'm still building the dungeon as they explore it, and I'm lucky that Tomb Of The Serpent Kings already has some bosses in it that I can examine. The only problem here is that they are clearly designed for a system like GLOG , which is great, but a bit too number-crunchy for my players. Their incompetence around numbers and basic math is why I use Into The Odd, but making a boss fight in Into

The Leviathan Is Coming! (Next Sunday, I Promise)

Oh dear, so I was supposed to have some content. Unluckily for me, the last two weeks were some of the busiest I've had in school quite yet (you wouldn't believe what they put us kiddos through these days). Anyway, this week I should have the mini-campaign that I promised in the last post finished. Luckily, though, I had lots of time to plan, so I should theoretically have something good to offer. Anyway, this post has some gameable content, trust me. Here is a sneak-peek of a region in my mini-campaign in the making called "The Cliffs". The island itself will have three regions that have the following: 2 minor points of interest that take up about half a page in a two column format. They each have a few tables so there is some added gameplay in those regards, a session might even be able to revolve completely around one minor point of interest if the GM makes it appealing enough and is good at improvising. (Of course, the tables serve as an aid for improv, too.)

Roll 3D6 For...

I love the idea of 3D6 tables. It's short, succinct, special, and fits in with the whole OSR motto of "roll 3D6" (not that that matters too much, but I think it's kinda neat), plus it also provides 216 results. In Stained In Blood And Honey, I had an addendum with a 3D6 table, and I plan to have many more addendums like that in the future. Since I'm kinda low on time and energy today, and 3D6 tables don't take too much time to make, here's a couple weird 3D6 tables for your games in case you ever need them. (Also, special thanks to Spwacks for making the HTML coding that makes it possible to generate stuff without going to the doc, you can find Spwacks here ) This first is Abomination Accessories, the table kinda requires you to have a sort of form for the abomination already established. Such as a human, a goblin, or some sort of animal. You get the gist. 3d6 Abomination Accessories The second is Tools For Troglodytes, it is basically what you wo

On Formatting

Oh dear, I didn't expect to be posting again so early. Some people over on Chris McDowall's Discord (Which you, if you haven't yet, should join) were wanting to know my secrets as to how I formatted my first adventure. Lucky for them and you, I am pretty lenient with the methods to my madness. Now, just to put some context to this, my experience is pretty much limited to about a quarter of a year spent in a graphic design class in freshmen year of high school and the program I use is the oh-so-free Google Docs, so don't take my word as gospel. So here it is, some sample documents and general tips about how to make alright looking formatting in Google Docs: First, for some tips. Feel free to ignore them if you just want to go grab some documents with my formatting already applied. While my formatting does look like it is in two columns, I don't actually use the integrated feature of columns under the format tab in docs. In fact, I don't use anything under

Stained In Blood And Honey

Hello and welcome to my quaint cranny in the vast ocean of OSR content, glad to have you here! As my introductory post, I'll be showing off the first adventure I've ever made, Stained In Blood And Honey. As some backstory, I'm pretty new to the OSR scene and have been lurking for a while. With the recent shutdown of Google+, I've broken my lurking status by introducing myself to  Chris McDowall's Discord Server  (all of you should join it, it's a great little community) and have introduced my first piece of content to the world. So far Stained In Blood And Honey has gotten good reception (which I wasn't expecting, being so new to the RPG scene as a whole, and especially new to the OSR scene) If you need a solid hook, the adventure has: Very little prep time needed to run (the adventure is only 3 pages, including the addendum content that is completely optional to use) 3 tables for when you need to know exactly who that poor disposable hireling is or wh