Mythic Bastionland was released this year, and I got a physical copy of it some months back. It’s a fantastic read with beautiful illustrations and the typical Chris McDowall terse prose. It’s obviously going for something Arthuriana’ish, along with sensibilities from Pendragon and developments from the “Into the Odd” world. So naturally, I thought, “why not make it sci-fi?”  More specifically, I wanted to try to adapt the myths into a sci-fi context. Mythic Bastionland is a tight product, with a very neat interplay between the concept of Knights, Myths, People, the Sandbox and the passage of time. My own gut instinct told me that taking any one part from this design would probably break on its own. But breaking things is how you learn to put it back together or appreciate loss. Or you can pick a sci-fi subgenre that could plausibly be close enough to rhyme a bit with Mythic Bastionland.  For my part, I’ve longed for a particular franchise in RPG form - the game series called...

As part of my ongoing effort to write a little winter mystery, here is a guide to making a character suitable for the Frozen Moonlight adventure. I'm probably, very likely, going to lean on 2400 or "Just Roll High" for this adventure. DallE attempts to illustrate Norwegians in the 19th century.    Your Investigator To create a character, you and the game master can go through the following steps:   1. Choose a Name 2. Roll for Qualities 3. Select a Background 4. Choose a Specialty 5. Select Equipment Name   Select an appropriate name for your character. If you can’t think of one, you can always make a roll or choose from the table below. Male Names Female Names Family Names Ole Anna Hansen Johan Marit Johansen Hans Inger Olsen Nils Kari Larsen Anders Berit Andersen Lars Liv Nilsen Knut Guri Pedersen Peder Sigrid Eriksen Sven Oline Kristiansen Erik Eli Magnussen Jon Ragna Svendsen Magnus Hilda Knudsen Qualities   Each character receives a set of random qualities...

This post is part of my attempts to write something of a little adventure before Christmas. It’s inspired by the Adventure Calendar jam , but I can’t do daily entries. So instead I will do an entry each week before Christmas. DallE's attempt to illustrate Granholt.  Something is haunting the old village of Granholt, Norway. On the last full moon before Christmas, over the course of three days, a house and its occupants will be found frozen. Candles would be snuffed, the fireplaces refusing to be lit. Some were found frozen in their last moments trying to light their fireplace. The first victim was Old Mrs Lofttun, who was found dead in her bed, clutching a cross. Her cabin on the edge of the village was left abandoned after that. The next victims were mother Sara Myrkløft and little Maria Myrkløft, both found in an embrace by the cold fireplace. The firewood had no single scorch mark even, despite all the spent matches. The third was baker Svein Ravndal, who was baking cookies, but...

A few years back I ran a campaign called Hyperdrift Stories, which combined two different games in effect. You could play as part of the starship Tempest’s crew, or you could play in a strategic game as one of the major factions in Settled Space. We got in about 18 sessions with the Tempest crew and played around 8 turns with the strategic game. Now, I want to do something like this again, but I have some different approaches. I’m running a cyberpunk campaign that is open table - anyone can join. The campaign is set in New Ashford, a mega city with many arcologies, cities buried under cities and powerful corporations locked in a strained alliance.  The abstract map of the city.  What I’ve done with this campaign is set up two systems (for now) that pertain to how you play. Downtime is handled in a very specific “ Citizen Sleeper ”-style gameplay, where each turn lasts a real-time week. In this system you can explore the city, meet new characters and manage resources. This part...

This post holds some options for 2400 -style games. I wrote it for BRUTALIST , but it didn’t make the cut. It’s relatively low-tech and rudimentary to fit the casettepunk-vibe I was going for.  Image generated with DALL-E.   HOMEBASE Establishing a homebase costs 30 Credits - pick a location from the list in the following section. The homebase is fitted with the following setup (upgrades cost 10 credits each). COMMUNICATIONS: Basic shortwave radio. Upgrades: long-range HF radio, secured frequency modulator, signal interception unit. DEFENSES: Basic mechanical alarms. Upgrades: extensive alarm system, reinforced barricades, light sensor security system. LIVING QUARTERS: Basic accommodations. Upgrades: improved living conditions, individualized quarters, makeshift infirmary. WORKSHOPS: Basic repair tools. Upgrades: electronics bench, explosives handling area, advanced mechanic's bay. SURVEILLANCE: Basic lookout posts. Upgrades: periscope surveillance system, rooftop post, t...

Last weekend we were holding FKR Con over at the FKR Collective. I decided to run a one shot in a setting I call FULL CARBON JACKET. It’s inspired by a lot of things, but the most important inspiration is the TV show Ultraviolet. The show was released in 1998 and had a grounded approach that blended detective work, forensics and SWAT style action with the techno-futurist optimism of the 1990s. The premise is that the players are working for the Harker institute, following leads on potential “Code Five” activity. Once the target is identified, they plan to trap the vampire through several means. Salt, ultraviolet lights, carbon jacketed bullets, stakes, silver-fragment grenades, you name it, they got it.  Image generated with Midjourney. The Scenario The scenario I ran was called “A Shadow in the Clinic” and basically featured a rural clinic. This clinic had been infiltrated some time ago by Walter Pitman. In his former life, he was a local farmer and a familiar face in the communit...

Preparing for playing roleplaying games is a is known burden for Game Masters. Ginny Di recently featured a video explaining her problems with GM burnout, and I’ve personally experienced similar things. As have my friends who run campaigns. I don't really have a solution for this, but I can explain what I do more of these days. And that is “five minute prep” games. I have two skills that I use for running games on five minutes of prep, which are using random generation and improvising. Random generation is maybe as expected, using encounter tables and adventure tables (such as those found in the 2400 micro games). What I typically do is create a pitch for a 2 hour session, which are typically simple jobs made complicated. This only takes a minute to roll up, usually, which sets the basis for the session. Following that, I set up a location that most importantly must feel real. Improvisation comes in when the game is running. Typically I describe locations in a grounded manner that ...

I’m preparing to run a Roadside Picnic’ish setting soon using 2400 . There’s one of Jason Tocci’s microgames that already cover this type of setting, but I want to make some additions on top of that. The idea is to run a realtime campaign for a quarantine zone set in the year 1983.  Picture by Tobias Wahlquist , used with permission. I changed the advancement rule to match the pace of the campaign, so the notation for the character creation is slightly different too. In typical 2400 games, the skill level is expressed in dice notation.  Advancement: You can advance your skills by training a number of weeks equal to your Skill Total (add together all skill ranks) + the next rank. Advancing a skill rank grants a better skill die: OPERATORS Choose a speciality.  BUNKER RAT: Advance (rank 1) any two skills from Climbing, Navigation, Running or Stealth. Take one good outdoors outfit and choose between fair camping gear or climbing gear.  FIGHTER: Advance (rank 1) any tw...

The following are intended for use in a playtest campaign set in Netherlight, an Into the Odd expansion I’m working on. Netherlight takes the adventurers to the stars in magical spaceships, exploring alien worlds and crossing into the shadowy dimension of the Nether. In these odd places, the characters may find new gear and artifacts. 

The following is for my Netherlight project. It's meant to give a vibe of some populated worlds you could find in the setting. Feel free to join my discord , where I post more regular updates on the project.  The Galaxy The Galaxy is vast. There are as many worlds as you can imagine. Some are settled, while many more are unexplored.  The Galaxy is old. Humans have built their cities for millennia. Each world has legends and myths. The Galaxy is thriving. Explorers and traders set out every day. Diverse spacecraft ply its expanse.  Image generated by Midjourney AI.

So travel is a big part of adventures. Braving majestic mountains, navigating insidious swamps and traversing foreboding forests. Lord of the Rings, the books as well as the movies, would not be the same without their iconic locations. Minas Tirith’s grandeur is incredible in contrast to the Shire. Interspersed between these grand locations, there are also the lesser locations, such as Bree, the Watchtower, the calcified Trolls, the Argonaths, I could go on forever. Yet, it has often been my experience that journeys in RPGs fall short of this. Often in spite of procedures. I don’t have any solutions… yet. In this post, I will describe some thoughts I’ve had about travel in roleplaying games.   Picture by Frank Winkler , used with permission. Where is the fun? For the most part, I’ve experienced travel roleplay in roughly two forms. One is basically a quick summary of “what happened” as the party went from A to B, with varying degrees of descriptions of the landscape. The other is t...

So, I had a little idea the other day. I call it "Dungeon World" just to cause confusion. But it's also literally a world of dungeons 😏 . No, literally . There is no natural landscape in this world. It's all dungeons.  Picture by Rudy and Peter Skitterians , used with permission. It was originally built by unknowable creators in some unknowable time in the past. Since then, mages from various planes of existence discovered the place and decided to add their own touches. Many peoples live here. To them, the thought of a world not made by the Makers is just freaking weird. Mountains of just solid rock? Preposterous. Only the great edifices of the Makers or the Mage-Kings that followed should reach towards the skies. Food is something you get from the Garden-Cemeteries of Ceres. Or maybe you hunt it in the Underworld.  Picture by 132369 , used with permission.  Journey deep enough and you find the Columns That Hold The World. Great hexagonal pillars made of a substance ...

 Last week I wrote about how I run games , but I felt I had more to say on the prep part, so here we are. A more detailed example of how I prep. I decided I wanted to run a sci-fi game, after finding some inspiration from recently watching Cowboy Bebop and playing the new Guardians of the Galaxy game. Since it’s December, I decided I wanted a christmas theme to it and keep it to a one-shot. I just wanted a sci-fi hit again. So I started thinking about what I wanted for this one-shot. The requirements were that it should be playable in 2 hours and feel satisfactory as a one-shot. Matt Colville once said in a video that you could roughly fit 5 encounters in a session - he was talking about 5e and probably a longer session. I think 5 encounters works for 2 hours if you’re doing it free kriegsspiel style. So with that in mind, I figured salvaging a small ship could be a neat little mission. For laughs, I decided to theme it as a sci-fi version of Santa’s sled - except it’s a spaceship...

Centuries ago, on the eve of Winter Solstice, the city of Rabenstadt was swallowed in its entirety and placed in the Nether. The unfortunate citizens were completely oblivious to this event, damned to relive the same day and night in perpetuity.  A day and night of a merciless blizzard, bloody riots, strange rituals and a secret revealed deep underground.  In this city, Baron Tiberius of House Hirschberg schemes to enchant the Count’s son through vampiric means. The Third Eye , a secret cult, works to complete a ritual to conjure an otherworldly material. In the shadows, devout servants from the Order of Saint Vidar hunt their sworn enemies - vampires and sorcerers.  Inspiration: Neuschwanstein Castle . Source: Pixabay . The City There are four crucial locations in Rabenstadt. In the Castle , the nobility gather for their annual Winter Ball. The wealthy citizens in the Upper District have engaged the army to keep angry protesters out. At the University , rumors have i...

So we’re well into 2021 and I decided it could be interesting to look a bit at the developments in the FKR. There’s been some coverage on Questing Beast’s Glatisant, but the mentions are brief and few. I decided I wanted to highlight a bit what’s going on, starting out with the Itch.io FKR tag .    I’ll go through each product and briefly describe them. In this post, I’ll go over 25 of them.  The order is basically “as is” on the page, so “Popular”. Note that the order will likely change over time, so I just took it “as it was” when I wrote it. Cosmogony  Gnarled Monster’s Cosmogony  is a Free Kriegsspiel wargame that deals with the creation of a world. Become gods, build civilizations and bring it all crashing down afterwards. It’s a nice pamphlet game and if you’re into games like Microscope, then this might be something for you.  24XX System Reference Documents Jason Tocci made a “killer app” when it comes to rules ultralight roleplaying games. His 2400 ...