Seasonal greetings to you! This has been a strange year, to say the least. I hope all of you who read this blog get to spend time with loved ones and leave 2020 on a better note.  The year in review This year, I finally concluded the Curse of Strahd campaign I had been running with my friends from the university. In November, I got to start up a new campaign with them in the Star Wars universe. I also started another campaign with some friends from Discord, playing in the Revenant Sector setting. Scheduling being what it is, I've managed to get 5 sessions since late September.  I have also been playing in a campaign that concluded recently, run by the Eldritch Rusk . We used Knave to play in a Norse-inspired fantasy setting. We explored an island, a Norse version of Caves of Chaos, a frozen tomb, and a village near the Barrow Maze. Not long after, the world, and the campaign, ended.  Following this, that game group has begun a new island-hopping campaign including Hot Springs Isla

So I am running a Star Wars campaign for my regular group these days. They are in a remote sector of the Outer Rim, looking for a spaceship that holds the secrets of the Jedi Archives. They are not alone in this sector, however. There are other factions at large. New Republic patrols, Bounty hunters, Imperial remnants, local hegemons, etc.  One faction planning an attack on another faction. So what I could do, is to just get the free version of Stars Without Number  and check out the Factions chapter. I usually recommend it to others. I have used it in several games, including the more recent Revenant Sector game I am running.  However, for this new campaign, I want to try something different. I want to Free Kriegsspiel it a bit. I’ve talked about Free Kriegsspiel in the context of roleplaying , but in this case, it will be about factions. So I am making a factions game to supplement your roleplaying game. The game is inspired by Free Kriegsspiel, Kriegsspiel Chess, Stars Without Numbe

 If I look back at my history of roleplaying games, I see one clear arc. The rulebooks got slimmer and slimmer. My gaming started out in earnest with Dungeons & Dragons 3e, which is about an inch thick rulebook. Now, I play systems that barely take up a page. This is mostly the result of having experienced sessions that hit a slow pace for a variety of reasons, such as granular combat, or just discussions about how spells worked.  When I learned about the OSR, I was overcome with mixed feelings. The retro-clones seemed excessively punitive, with their “ save or die ” mechanics, the anemic hit point amounts, and total lack of feats. At the time, the table I was playing at was hosted by a GM that was flirting with OSR, but trying to make it work with Pathfinder. This led to some conflicting expectations, and inevitably some tough discussions. However, I was left with a copy of Swords & Wizardry in my hands, and that sort of started my journey into the OSR.  Running a game became

In a world half-remembered lies the Dreaming Sea. Hundreds of islands can be found here. Some are undiscovered, others are home to many. In an age of exploration, many have come to the Dreaming Sea to find a new home, trade, or discover. The worries of the Old World are left behind, but there are still dangers here. Strange creatures lurk beneath the waves, while corsairs prowl in the skies. Nature’s tempests will at times blot out the sun and cause great turmoil at sea.  So the blurb above describes the basis of an adventure setting I have been cooking up lately. The setting is inspired by Porco Rosso, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the Odyssey, and just generally my appreciation of the early decades of flight. The idea is that the players take the role of Aeronauts (like aviators or pilots, really) who are exploring a vast sea that has yet to been explored. Adventures can involve racing, search and rescues, delving in forgotten temples, deterring sky pirates, and bragging about

Previously I have talked about sci-fi dungeon crawls and how technology affects it. I mentioned in passing to draw inspiration from Immersive Sims, which is a genre of video games that try to present levels with interactive systems. What I want to do with this blog-post is to set the stage for discussing the design of sci-fi locations for roleplaying games. I will make up some terms, keep it system agnostic, and provide some perspectives that will hopefully be useful to you. The first three types of locations I want to bring attention to are spaceships , space stations , and surface bases . Generally, these types of locations feature complicated systems, ranging from power plants to security systems. These types of locations are inhabited, so it becomes important to also show that aspect of it. That could mean putting in a toilet and bunk beds, but it could also mean thinking about how daily life on the location works. How do people get from their beds to work? How do people pass the

We played the third session of Revenant’s Sector, a sci-fi sandbox campaign using the Revenant’s Hack . The characters are: Malik Zhao, a part-time ecology enthusiast.  Silas Nowak, generous bar patron.  Terry Browning, Guiney-monkey wrangler.  In the last session , they finally arrived on Taphos. With a mission to recover the Raker , the crew had decided to acquire firearms and meet up with a contact they made on the way.  Hanging around in Nara’s Outpost  The session resumed outside the general store. They had more than an hour to pass, so they decided to explore the surroundings of the outpost. Malik was curious about the ecology on Taphos, so he decided to examine the grass-like lifeforms there. To his surprise, he noticed that the “grass” was mobile, capable of retracting its tri-fork stem from the ground. They also came across younger fern trees, which were coiled up and preparing to bloom.  Back at Ryuma’s (the bar), they met with Tobias Alcantar. This time, he was dressed in pi

So after a discussion about a D&D’ish society that has undergone its first industrial revolution, I came to think of a new school of magic. In this world, banks are a thing, and so is paper money. Now you don’t have to lug around chests of gold coins, but instead a fat wad of artisanal paper money. Enter the Kermamancer - the MONEY WIZARD . The money wizard has specialized in marking bills, locating stolen money, and launching fists of coins at enemies. Banks employ these wizards to ensure the safety of their clients’ fortunes. If a daring band of adventurers managed to delve their way into a bank, they might end up facing one of these types of wizards and their swole coin golems.  You will need these. Lots of them!

  We played the second session of Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox . The characters are: Malik Zhao, script-slinger extraordinaire.  Silas Nowak, pilot and shady person.  Terry Browning, a get-away driver without a car. 

  As part of my Curse of Strahd campaign, I recently ran Winter’s Daughter. Ever since it was released, I had wanted to run it, but could not find a good spot to put it in. Eventually, I did, and here we are. It took about two 4 hour sessions to play through. Since I’ve run it, I feel I can give it a review.  Winter’s Daughter is written by Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome and was published April 27, 2019. The pdf clocks in at 32 pages. Warning, this review contains some spoilers. 

This week I got to playtest Revenant’s Hack in the sci-fi sandbox I am developing . I was joined by three players from the Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying discord. Here is a brief recap of the events that took place. Character creation Character creation went fast for all players involved. There isn’t that much to do in Revenant’s Hack besides distributing 2 points over 3 stats. However, I also tested out a skill list which they got to distribute 4 points over. Besides the stats, I also asked them “Why did you die and wake up in a cryogenics correctional facility?” which sparked a brainstorm about why these characters were in their predicament.  It turns out that Terry died in a car crash, allegedly escaping from law enforcement. Silas apparently shot Malik, but it was unclear why this happened. Discovering their past becomes a mystery that they would like to uncover, but due to their cyberbrains being installed in new bodies, their memories are vague and unreliable.  In the course of a

Last week, I made the case for writing adventures, not systems . This week, I decided to follow my own advice and continue the preparation for my sci-fi sandbox. I’ve posted before about the most important NPC in your sandbox , but I haven’t addressed the sandbox itself. So this is the entry in which I start the work on a sandbox!  Behold, the Revenant Sector! The black dots are solar systems without descriptions.

For the last ten years, I have been really committed to making stuff for tabletop games. Despite that amount of time, I have only ever published one thing for roleplaying games - that’s an 18-page zine. Yet, I have a digital graveyard of games projects on my Google Drive account.  What is happening here? 

  Recently, I was a player in a campaign using the Knave rules. The setting was inspired by Norse mythology close to the end times - Ragnarok. Amongst many locations, the Referee had put in set-dressed versions of Keep on the Borderlands and Barrowmaze. Despite the delves and riches, I never actually reached level 3 or higher with any of the characters I played. I delved deep with only 5 hit points, and it was great!  They all have 5 hit points, but so do you. 

  Despite there being a lot of dungeons out there, very few of them are meant to be played with a sci-fi ruleset like Traveller or Stars Without Number. There are a number of assumptions that go out the window with the tech levels in question. In this post, I will discuss some thoughts that appeared in the #workshop channel on the OSR Discord. If you want in on this discussion, join us over at the #sci-fi-scrapyard and talk shop. Link: https://discord.gg/PRg3RWJ

I’ll be upfront - it’s about the spaceship your PCs call home. If you run a sci-fi OSR game with a spaceship like the Millennium Falcon , the Serenity, or the Rocinante , then chances are your PCs consider it a mobile home.  Having floor plans for the spaceship is great. It gives your players a sense of the vessel. Add to that, letting them “move in” by assigning crew quarters is also great for immersion and roleplaying. But as a referee, you can also go ahead and give the spaceship a sense of character .  The Raker was real fast, but its coffee machine kept breaking apart.

 How to get from A to B - interstellar edition. This post is meant to be a small write up about various sci-fi technologies that enable interstellar travel and how they influence a sci-fi campaign. 

I have been running Castle Amber these days. It has a weird mix of rooms, ranging from some odd things to the more bizarre stuff. During the latest session, I came across a design I wasn’t quite happy about, and it involves save or die .   Castle Amber has a few rooms which involve save or die. There is a throne room featuring a deadly throne, a bedroom with a dangerous safe, and an alchemy lab. Two of these rooms offer a choice. One of them can just straight up kill the character, regardless of what they do.  The Rooms The throne room features a couple of thrones, one of which contains the soul of a magic-user. Upon entering the room, the magic-user’s soul will attempt to take possession of a randomly determined individual. The chances of the possession ramps up over time, but the PCs can presumably escape the hazard by leaving the room.  The bedroom with the safe is quite different. The safe is hidden and trapped. If the PCs somehow manage to open it, they risk exposing themselves t

Roleplaying with my children has always been an aspiration I had, but I’ve not always been successful at it. Last Halloween I ran a relatively simple adventure where the kids had to rescue the village by gathering four artifacts to drive away the evil. Before that, I tried to get an adventure going with my eldest child, but it didn’t catch his interest.  Lately, things have changed. Earlier this summer I ran a simple “legacy board game” prototype test for the kids, which worked quite well. I repurposed the rules for Afrikan tähti , which is a common board game in Scandinavian schools and kindergartens. The setting was “Mars”, lightly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “[...] of Mars” book series. The kids enjoyed it, but I closed the campaign after 4 sessions. Prepping with prints took time and it was difficult to maintain such a loop.  Since the setting was already familiar to the kids, I decided to try out roleplaying in that setting. I can go into the Mars setting I made later, but I