New Character Options from Erlendheim Part 2

Gods are superheroes too

In the last post, I wrote about how D&D 5E characters are basically superheroes by another name. I also introduced the new Warlock patron that we came up with for Yulla in our D&D 5E campaign, Erlendheim, a few years ago. She had abandoned her “Fathomless” patron and taken up with “The Source.” After Yulla got her groove back and started living up to her potential, it was our Druid’s turn.

Habjorn, played by David, had not wasted the years since their former adventuring days. He’d settled down with his wife, Lydia and started a little family which quickly ballooned into a sizeable troupe of children. There were seven in total, Habjornson, Sigrid, Gurt, Hogarth, Jankur, Flaarj and Yeet, the little one. But, as I noted last time, they, along with several of their neighbours, went and got themselves kidnapped by one of the antagonists. Lydia had already passed away a few years previous.

So, obviously, the party to go to great lengths to find them. Lengths that eventually led them to Sigil and beyond.

While the party were in the City of Doors, they got a job from Kesto Brighteyes, the gnomish owner of the Parted Veil, a bookshop where the PCs went to find the tome they were looking for. I found Kesto and everything about him in Uncaged: Faces of Sigil. This was an invaluable source-book for this campaign and provided at least three incredibly useful, well drawn and significant NPCs who were residents of the Cage with depth and interconnectedness.

Anyway, this quest led them off to the Lady’s Ward of the city, where they managed to defeat the object of their quest, a Gautierre. Upon the occasion of their victory, Habjorn the druid was approached by Lydia, his dead wife, in the form of a Petitioner. Petitioners are the souls of dead sentients, ascended to the Outer Planes who are, to all intents and purposes, reborn into new lives there with no memories of their old ones. They normally turn up on the plane where their gods lived or, at least, on a plane that matches their alignment. But, Lydia’s god, it turned out, was dead. So, she started wandering the planes looking for somewhere to belong. Until she felt a pull drawing her to her husband when he passed through a portal into Sigil.

Lacking a god or any sense of purpose, she felt a connection with Habjorn that she thought she should have had with her god, Helm, but didn’t due to his deceased state. So she started to believe in Habjorn like a god. She didn’t necessarily agree with him all the time or obey him at all, in fact, but she still had a strong enough belief in him to essentially grant him the status of a Minor Power, a godling out there on the Outer Planes.

It was actually pretty tragic. He was overjoyed/heartbroken to see her again but she didn’t recognise him and had no memory of their life together before her death. She knew nothing of their family and her motivations were totally different as a Petitioner.

But I digress. Before he knew it, Habjorn started hearing the prayers of his kids, held deep underground on the plane known as the Outlands, under the roots of one of the World Tree’s saplings. They were hoping and praying that he would come and save them and their belief began to compound the meagre abilities provided by Lydia’s own prayers.

And thus the Druidic Deity was born. So, like Thor and Hercules (kinda) before him, Habjorn became a superhero god!

Now, believe me, I understand that this stuff is totally unbalanced and potentially game-breaking. But I was throwing these characters up against some very tough situations, so I felt ok about it. I will point out, also, that, unlike the Warlock patron from the last post, this is not a subclass. Instead, its a couple of new features that work for Habjorn the Circle of the Land Druid/minor god, in particular. It is unlikely to work for anyone else in its current form but I think it was a fun addition to his set of abilities that allowed him to do some interesting stuff in particular situations and led to some truly fantastic character and story moments in our game. So, take it under advisement! But, if you want to use it or any part of it, please feel free!

New Druid Features: Druidic Deity

Grant Druidic Magic

The Druidic Deity can grant two cantrips and two first level spells from the Druid Spell List to their follower/s. The druidic deity can grant the cantrips and spells once and cannot do so again until they have completed a long rest.

The Power of Prayer

When a worshiper has prayed for spells to be granted the Druidic Deity gains a Prayer. There is no upper limit to the number of Prayers the Druidic Deity can be in possession of and if not spent before taking a long rest, they carry over. The Druidic Deity can spend a Prayer using a bonus action. This Prayer can be spent in several different ways:

  • Allow the Druidic Deity to regain an expended spell slot of any level they have access to
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to gain another use of Wild Shape
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to Wild Shape into any CR 2 Beast or Monstrosity that they have seen
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to remain in Wild Shape for double the normal length of time
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to cast spells while in Wild Shape
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to use the Natural Recovery feature to regain all used spell slots including 6th level ones and higher
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to cast one of their Circle Spells without expending a spell slot
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to empower their Land’s Stride ability , granting them the opportunity to pass into a plant of sufficient size and emerge from a similar plant of sufficient size within 200 ft
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to empower their Nature’s Ward feature, granting them immunity to one more damage type of their choice until they complete a long rest
  • Allow the Druidic Deity to empower their Nature’s Sanctuary feature so that beast and plant creatures cannot attempt to save against it.
  • Grant a worshiper another cantrip or first level spell

So, like I mentioned above, I know these features are potentially game-breaking and open to abuse. But my players took this sort of thing in good faith and David played his character as he thought he should react to becoming a slightly shitty kind of god. He was somewhat incredulous but used every ounce of his power to do the things his “worshipers” wanted of him. In other words, for Daddy to come and save them. And that’s what he did.

I would mention here as well, that balance, as a concept in D&D/TTRPGs in general is a concept that I take with extreme caution. I would rather chuck an unbeatable monster at them and have them figure out they need to run away or use their wits instead of charging headlong into the fray, then stick to Challenge Ratings most of the time. In this respect, I think the OSR has it right. But, I think this door swings both ways, if a challenge can be unbalanced due to an encounter’s difficulty, the PCs can also be a challenge due to their ability. They should get to feel like the superheoroes thery are. On the other hand, I also have the ability to keep piling on the difficulty as the party gets more and more powerful, so I see it as a win-win.

Let me know if you have any comments on these nutty druid features, dear reader.

New Character Options from Erlendheim Part 1

D&D Superheroes

There’s no doubt in my mind that the creators of the current version of D&D meant to make the PCs into superheroes. This goes for 5E 2014 as well as 2024.

You can have opinions about this. There are times when it frustrates the hell out of me as a DM just trying to introduce potentially deadly situations to our games. I usually overestimate the lethality of these situations, whether they might be traps, encounters or particularly difficult episodes of exploration. The players normally trounce these situations readily. They always have a feature or a spell or a power or a magic item or a special friend who will come to their rescue so that they emerge largely unscathed and only further emboldened. On the other hand, I do feel bad when a PC dies in one of my campaigns. I mean, of course! They spent hours designing and imagining and embodying this person… and they died… it can be devastating. It should be devastating. Not just for the player in question, but for every player in the game, including the DM. So I get it. I understand why the average D&D PC’s life expectancy has sky-rocketed in the last couple of decades. I also understand that if you want something more lethal, Troika! is right there. So, if you want more lethal play, there are plenty of options.

Anyway, when I finally realised the superheroness of the characters, we were playing one of my long-time RPG group’s more iconic campaigns. It was called Erlendheim and it was based on my home-brew world of Scatterhome. Here’s the TLDR for the campaign:

The PCs were all former adventurers living in or around their hometown of Dor’s Hill on the island of Erlendheim. The island was surrounded by a terrible and eternal storm meaning no-one could leave and no-one new ever turned up. The PCs started at level 8, but their adventuring days were behind them. Until one day, they were asked by the powers that be in Dor’s Hill to investigate some strange reports from an outlying fishing village. While they were off fighting what turned out to be Yugoloth fiends there, all six of the Druid’s kids were kidnapped by some more extraplanar beings. This, eventually and after much adventuring, roleplaying, schmoozing and drama, led them to Sigil, The City of Doors, The Cage. For the uninitiated, Sigil is the city at the centre of the Outlands, the plane at the centre of the Outer Planes in the D&D cosmology.

Now, as a die-hard AD&D 2nd Edition player of old, I was a massive fan of the original Planescape setting, the new shit it introduced to the game and the way it expanded our horizons as both DM and players when it came out in the nineties. But, I’ll be honest, I don’t think I knew how to use it as a 14 or 15 year old DM. It was just too massive. I wrote and ran adventures that were pretty much standard AD&D adventures except in a place in the Outlands instead of on the bog-standard fantasy world I had devised. So, in 2021, when I got the chance to send these PCs to Sigil!!! I grabbed that bull by both horns. It was so much better than I could have hoped. Even just the act of getting there was a major campaign milestone. And before long, both the players and the characters were knee-deep in planar weirdness. They didn’t know it, they didn’t understand most of it, but they still had goals. They were there for a reason (they had to find a book that explained the keys to all the planar doors in a mysterious tower beneath the town of Dor’s Hill back home.) So they pursued that. On the way, they all gained even more super powers than they already possessed. Why? Because, once you understand that D&D 5E is a superhero game, it’s a good idea to lean into it.

The first PC to get blessed in this manner was our warlock, Yulla (played by Tom.) Now, it just so happened that Yulla, up until this point, had a patron named Aegir, an elemental spirit that turned out to be the baddest guy of the entire campaign. So, when she went to Sigil her confidence in their patronage had taken a few knocks. When she then discovered her long lost, presumed dead parents there she was open to new possibilities. Now I was using the gorgeous, unimpeachable original version of the Planescape setting for this game. It was made for AD&D 2nd Edition but that was no impediment at all. (When I got the new 5E version I was a little shocked and affronted to find that they had done away with one of my favourite Sigil factions, the Believers of the Source. I understand that this actually happened way back in one of the nineties Planescape novels but I never read those so I had no way of knowing.) Anyway, the entirety of my Erlendheim campaign had been built around the Believers, their doctrines, their headquarters, etc. And it turned out that Yulla’s birth-parents had been members of the believers for decades since their supposed deaths. Anyway, this led Yulla to seek the Source as a patron, instead of the untrustworthy and, frankly quite evil Aegir.

And this is where the extra super powers come in. Tom and I designed a new Warlock Patron for Yulla, the Source itself. I based it around the philosophy of the Believers: you must try to reach your potential, your existence should be evolved as much as possible within your own lifetime, etc. Here is the result. If you like the look of it and you can find a way or reason to use this in your own campaign, please feel free.

New Warlock Patron – The Source V 2.1

Description

You have have made a pact with the ultimate creative and destructive power in the multiverse. The Source is that from which all things come and which all will someday rejoin. The members of Sigil’s faction, The Believers of the Source understand that all beings should be striving to evolve within their lifetimes to become one with the Source. To this patron, time and space have little meaning; sentients are beings of pure potential and a deep understanding of the planes of existence is essential.

Expanded Spell List

Spell LevelSpells
1stFind Familiar, Inflict Wounds
2ndWither and Bloom, Vortex Warp
3rdMotivational Speech, Life Transference
4thAura of Life, Vitriolic Sphere
5thDestructive Wave, Legend Lore

Features

1st Level Feature

Burst of Potential

From 1st level, as an action the warlock becomes a silhouette of themselves and emits a brief burst of soft yellow light. They draw on a fraction of the unlimited potential of the Source and grant it to those allies in a ten foot cube around them. Until the end of the Warlock’s next turn all within the aura gain advantage on a single ability check, attack roll or saving throw of their choice.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

1st Level Feature

Fragment of the Source

From 1st level, using a bonus action, the Warlock of the Source gains the ability to summon a fragment of the Source in the shape of a softly glowing orb. It will appear at a chosen point anywhere within 60ft of the Warlock. The Fragment of the Source will remain for a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier. The Fragment can use its potential energy to allow a creature within 5 feet of it to roll with advantage or force a creature within 5 feet of it to roll with disadvantage on any attack roll, saving throw or ability check. As a bonus action on their turn, the Warlock can move the Fragment up to thirty feet. The Warlock can summon the Fragment a number of times equal to their proficiency bonus and regains all expended uses when they finish a long rest. The Fragment of the Source will act on the same initiative as the Warlock.

6th Level Feature

Aura of Potential

From 6th level, the Warlock of the Source’s Burst of Potential feature becomes an aura. The effects are the same as the Burst but apply to each ally that starts their turn in the aura. Also, the effect can be used to ensure maximum damage on an attack roll.
The Aura of Potential lasts a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

6th Level Feature

Wasted Potential

From 6th Level, as a reaction, the Warlock of the Source may fire a sparkling yellow orb at any creature taking an action, making an attack roll or rolling a saving throw within a 30ft range. The creature must make a Charisma saving throw against the Warlock’s spell save DC or apply disadvantage to their roll.

10th Level Feature

Mark of Potential

From 10th Level, the Warlock of the Source begins to gain benefits from the potential bestowed or denied by the Aura of Potential and Wasted potential features. Each time an ally succeeds on a roll which benefits from the advantage bestowed by the Aura of Potential the Warlock gains a Mark of Potential. Each time a creature fails on a roll affected by Wasted Potential, the Warlock gains a Mark of Potential. Gained Marks spark briefly into being around the Warlock’s head before fading into invisibility.
At 10th level the Warlock can hold up to a maximum of nine Marks of Potential. At 14th level the Warlock can hold up to ten Marks of Potential (See the “Evolution” feature below for how ten marks can be spent.)
The appearance of the Marks is up to the individual Warlock.
Marks of Potential may be held until spent.
Marks of Potential can be used in the following ways:

Marks SpentEffect 1Effect 2Effect 3
1Apply advantage to any attack roll, saving throw or ability checkDouble the range of Fragment of Potential
2Roll a hit die plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
3Maximise any damage effectInduce a critical success
4Roll two hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
5Double the area of Aura of PotentialDouble the number of targets affected by Wasted PotentialDouble the number of Fragments of Potential Summoned
6Roll three hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
7Increase the casting level of any appropriate spell by one
8Roll four hit dice plus your Charisma modifier to regain hit points
9Regain a Spell Slot

14th Level Feature

Evolution

At 14th level the Warlock of the Source gains the ability to use ten Marks of Potential to evolve into a form which brings them closer to the Source for a number of rounds equal to the Warlock’s Charisma modifier. For each level the Warlock gains above 14th, the duration of the evolution is increased by one round.
In their evolved form, the Warlock gains the following features:

  • 5 hit dice plus Charisma modifier of temporary hit points
  • Makes all attack rolls, ability checks and saving throws with advantage
  • Triples the area of Aura of Potential

The appearance of the evolved form is up to the individual Warlock.
Once you use this feature you cannot use it again until you finish a long rest.

Backin’ Up

List

It might be hard to believe but I have another six, no seven entries in the list of projects I’m backing on Backerkit. Now, absolutely all of these are fully funded, their pledges have been called in and they’ve charged my card. I’m just waiting on their delivery at this stage.

So, let’s get into it:

  1. Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure 5E+DCC
  2. The Expanse Roleplaying Game: Transport Union Edition
  3. The Between
  4. Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game
  5. Stay Frosty REMASTERED
  6. 321RPG 5th Anniversary Expanded Rule Book + Encyclopedia Monstergoria
  7. Terror from the Underdeep: A Giant Box of 5E Adventure

If you’re interested in seeing what I have currently backed on Kickstarter, click here.

1. Caverns of Thracia Legendary Adventure 5E+DCC

Goodman games produce some of the highest quality books and other products in the TTRPG industry. Anyone who has glanced admiringly at the Doug Kovacs covers of any of their five million adventure modules for Dungeon Crawl Classics will know what I’m talking about. They’re also incredibly interesting artefacts that look like they were first published in the seventies but have a modern OSR sensibility when you get into them usually.

Anyway, last year, I was beginning to build a small collection of DCC books and other paraphernalia when this project was launched on Backerkit. Their timing was impeccable if they were specifically looking for my support. I didn’t hesitate. Since they were bringing out both a DCC and a 5E version of the boxed set, I went with the DCC one.

The Caverns of Thracia is a remake of an original and iconic module by Jennell Jacquays. It was a Greek myth-based scenario and it was published by Judges Guild in 1979. The Goodman Games version promises you a year long campaign from the boxed set, at least. It should take DCC characters from level 1 to level 5 and it contains a whole mega-dungeon along with all the new monsters, magic items, spells etc. that you might expect from something a big as this.

I splashed out on a dice set and a few extra books when it came to my pledge so I am expecting something very special when this arrives at my door in a month or two! You can check out the campaign page here. Also, if you’re interested you can go and pre-order it from a store near you if you look it up online.

2. The Expanse Roleplaying Game: Transport Union Edition

Get ready to decelerate towards the Ring. And maybe charge your rail guns while you’re at it. You never know what Inaros and his Free Navy might have in store for an inners’ freighter on a mission of peace out past the Belt.

I got into the Expanse with the TV show. It was a relatively hard sci-fi look at how our solar system might look in a couple of hundred years but with an alien mystery at its centre. Unfortunately, the TV show got cancelled, so I started reading, nay, devouring the books by James SA Corey. There are 9 Behemoth sized books and they take our heroes, privateers aboard the Independent freighter, Rocinante, across more about forty years and from lowly jobs on a gas hauler to the centre of the greatest events across three wars and dozens of solar systems.

It gets big.

Which is a cool premise for a sci-fi RPG. You know?

Green Ronin produced the Expanse Roleplaying Game a few years ago, but it was brought out before either the TV show or the books were finished so it did not include rules or details to cover some of the most important and universe-defining events, factions and tech that turns up in the latter half of the story. The new version sets the action in the thirty year gap between the sixth book, Babylon’s Ashes and the seventh book, Persepolis Rising. This is a very convenient gap for an RPG writer to place a lot of major events. These will be based around the activities of the newly minted Transport Union, established to take care of trade and exploration across the solar systems recently opened up by the activation of the Ring Gate Network left behind by an enigmatic and lost civilisation.

It uses the same AGE (Adventure Game Engine) as Dragon Age so should be familiar to a lot of gamers already. I can say, it is very easy to learn and pretty intuitive. I’m excited to see how it has been modified for this setting.

They’re also producing both character and ship minis for this campaign! I doubt it is something I would use in this sort of game, but it would still be very nice to have.

Check out the campaign page here.

3. The Between

I have written a bit about some of my favourite RPG related podcasts and actual plays in the past. But I don’t think I have mentioned Ain’t Slayed Nobody’s current run of the Between on the blog before. I love this show. The players are great, as always, the production values are exceptional, the GM, also the game’s creator, Jason Cordova, couldn’t be better, and the game itself is entertaining and dark and creepy and fun in equal measure. It is one of those shows that I queue up and listen to as soon as it drops.

This game has actually been around for a while too. The Backerkit campaign was to fund the production of a physical version. If I’m honest, it’s not really the type of game I would usually be drawn to. Victoriana, rarified conversations in drawing rooms and illicit trysts in haunted houses are not really my thing. Or at least, I didn’t think they were until I listened to the actual play of paragraph-before-this-one fame. Turns out, I enjoy those things quite a bit. It reminded me, unsurprisingly of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by the late, great Kev O’Neill and Alan Moore (not the dreadful movie of the same name.) And I love that comic book.

Not only that, its based on the same ruleset as Brindlewood Bay, also from Jason Cordova and the Gauntlet, which I have discussed to some small extent here. And though I still haven’t had the chance to play it, I would love to. I think it’s one of the greatest innovations in RPG mechanics in the last decade and deserves all the plaudits it gets.

Anyway, the game looks great, the book looks great. You should go and order it when it’s possible to do that. In the meantime, go and check out the campaign page here.

4. Welcome to Night Vale Roleplaying Game

Silence is golden. Words are vibrations. Thoughts are magic. Welcome to Nightvale

The cold open Welcome to Nightvale, episode 8, “The Lights in Radon Canyon” seemed an appropriate way to open this one.

I have been listening to Welcome to Nightvale for almost as long as it’s been around. It hooked me, originally, with its unique blend of weirdness, horror and humour. It kept me coming back as the desert town grew and changed along with its residents, like Cecil Gershwin Palmer, the Voice of Nightvale, John Peters (you know, the farmer?) and the Almighty Glow Cloud. I love the writing so much. The podcast’s co-creators, Jeffrey Craynor and Joseph Fink have been so prolific over these last 13 years, producing the podcast, related books, live shows (one of which I have even been to see. I got to meet Jeffrey Craynor there!) and lots of other Nightvale stuff. So it was about time we got a roleplaying game, right?

The game will use the Essence 20 system, which I am not even a little bit familiar with. It seems to be a system developed by Renegade Game Studios who are publishing this game. But, it looks like you roll a d20 to resolve actions, while adding another die depending on the skill you’re using and the proficiency you have with it. This all seems fine. But it’s not the mechanics that worry me here. Much like the Discworld game that I mentioned in the last post, I am just not sure how the RPG will retain and exemplify some of the core aspects of the podcast, its weird and uncomfortable hilarity, for instance. You do get something called “Weird Points” to effect situations in particular ways, apparently and according to Becca Scott in this How to Play Nightvale video and I’m sure they will have other mechanical and character options to keep it strange. I’m still not fully convinced this will come together in the right way at the table but I am obviously willing to get it and find out later.

If you’re interested in picking this one up, I believe there is a link to pre-order on their campaign page.

5. Stay Frosty REMASTERED

Look, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know much about this game before backing it. I have heard Tom McGrenery on the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast mention that he used a previous version for several of the modules that they reviewed on there. It’s a pared down, old school ruleset for running Aliens style sci-fi games and Tom has used it in some unlikely but interesting scenarios.
That, along with the fact that it was launched by the Melsonian Arts Council was enough to get me to back it. This is another company I would always back. Well, except that I won’t need to anymore now that I have become one of their subscribers. They recently launched this initiative, which means you pay them £10 a month and you get everything they publish along with special editions with limited covers and that sort of thing. This might mean they never have to run another crowd-funding campaign again!

This is a small snippet of the blurb from the Stay Frosty Backerkit page:

The system is perfect for point-crawls and dungeon-crawls where clearing rooms, blasting bugs, descending into hell, flying through space, and defeating hordes of monsters is on the table. Supports campaign length play and one-shot horror-tinged bug hunts.

You can find the original by Casey Garske here on DrivethruRPG for a steal.
And you can find the campaign page for the new version, also by Casey Garske, here. If you become a Friend of Melsonia, it is one of the books you will receive from them this year, also.

6. 321RPG 5th Anniversary Expanded Rule Book + Encyclopedia Monstergoria

Yet another one I am not terribly familiar with, 321RPG is something I backed on something of a whim to support John “Hambone” Maguire, of the Vintage RPG Podcast and his creative efforts.

This is the yet another one that’s not brand new. In this case, it’s an expanded edition, rather than a 2E or physical print edition. This is in celebration of the fifth anniversary of its original publication. The original game was designed to be flexible. They wanted it to be of use to any table in any genre and any play style, which are all incredibly difficult and lofty goals. Here’s what the campaign page says about the new version:

This expanded rule book is the culmination of four years of growth, a lifetime of gaming, and the incredible enthusiasm of our players. If there’s one rule for DMing that always holds true, it’s that you can never anticipate what the players will do. And that’s precisely what makes it all so exciting.

It’s also going to come with four new adventures, and an “Encyclopedia Monstergoria.”

Here’s the campaign page!

7. Terror from the Underdeep: A Giant Box of 5E Adventure

I think I fell for the marketing with this one. I am not really one for backing purely 5E based projects. If I had my druthers, I would probably move away from 5E altogether and maybe, someday, I will. But today is not that day.

I basically backed this Goodman Games project because it looked really really nice. Also, it’s massive in scale with more than 450 pages of content, new monsters, spells, magic items, fold-out maps and really exceptional artwork.

The version I decided to go for also comes with a bunch of DCC modules converted to 5E as well.

Here’s what the main adventure campaign for PCs of levels 8 to 16, is about, according to the Backerkit page:

The giant clans have allied – and no one knows why. Hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud and storm giants now work together to collect electrum. Their tracks lead to an abandoned city of the UnderDeep. In these lightless caverns, sinister cultists give the giants’ offerings to a misshapen kraken lord. Can your adventurers uncover the secrets behind this wicked alliance before it’s too late?

There’s a PDF preview on the campaign page.

Conclusions

Having covered each of the projects I am currently backing, I have come to the conclusion that I back too many things. There are, undoubtedly, a couple of these that I could have done without. I mean, I’m quite sure I will never even get to play most of them. But, as the old saying goes, playing games and collecting games are two different hobbies.

What are you backing right now, dear reader? Do we have any of these in common? Which ones are you most excited about? Get in the comments!

Kickin’ it

Round up

It’s been a little while since I did a list. It’s a good format to use when you are not totally sure what you want to write. And, yep, that’s how I’m using it today.

So, what’ve I been backing and kicking? Since the last one of these sorts of posts back in September 2024, quite a lot, actually.

On Kickstarter

Here’s the list. I’m going to write a bit about each of them down below.

  1. Solarcrawl
  2. A Perfect Wife: TTRPG Adventure + Fundraiser
  3. Glumdark
  4. A Feast for a Sphinx
  5. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork
  6. Royal Blood – A Tarot Heist RPG

1. Solarcrawl

Let’s start with the one that is still available to back on Kickstarter. Solarcrawl is an OSR exploration game set in a fantastic space age. It’s created by Galen Pejeau, an “illustrator and occasional game designer” according to their itch page.

I absolutely love the look of this one. The artwork seems to suit the subject matter so perfectly, its’ clean lines and definite, scientific style give it the right sort of vibe for a planet exploration game. I am excited to try it with the Death in Space rules but it is designed for any OSR game.

The idea is that your homeworld is dying and you are needed to go out and explore beyond the gravity well. So off you go to try to find new planets to explore and help you to revive your own.

The game is split into two phases, Mission Phase and Homeworld Phase. Mission allows you to go out and find planets, explore them and hopefully avoid their unique dangers. Afterwards, you have the Homeworld phase, when you do research, build and improve your ships, “regreening their world.” That sort of thing.

Take on dual roles: as the astronauts journeying forth to the other worlds within their solar system, and as the heads of the space agency that builds their rockets, chooses their destinations, and hopefully, work together in hopes of rekindling their fading world.

It funded very fast but I am sure the creator will appreciate any and all further backers. Go check out the campaign here. There’s still 10 days to go.

2. A Perfect Wife

One of the big Zine Month projects, this one caught my eye almost immediately. The project was created by David Blandy of Eco Mofos fame, but the creators of this scenario zine are Zedeck Siew, Amanda Lee Franck and Scrapworld.

It’s another OSR project. One of their stretch goals was to make it specifically compatible with the Liminal Horror RPG but, as I understand it, it should still be easily useable in any other OSR game.

The adventure is described as “urban horror” and explicitly involves a Malaysian mythical creature known as the Pontianak. This is the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. According tot he wiki I have linked to, the spirit seeks out her victims by sniffing out their drying laundry. Apparently this is why Malays will not leave clothes out to dry at night.

This one is very interesting since the main aim of it was to pay the airfare and living expenses of the creators on a trip to Nottingham, England.

The purpose of this campaign is twofold. It seeks to fund:

1: The publication of a tabletop RPG adventure zine in print and PDF.
2: The air tickets and living expenses for Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and Zedeck Siew to spend one week in Nottingham.

With the former, we hope to entice you to help us with the latter.

You get: a complete mystery- and horror-themed adventure with evocative art based on an iconic-but-underrepresented Southeast Asian monster.

We get: an opportunity for three TTRPG designers to cross oceans and meet their peers, and each other, for the first time.

This will give them the opportunity to attend the Weird Hope Engines art exhibition, focusing attention on indie game creators, in Nottingham. They will be exhibiting works there themselves.

Curated by Dying Earth Catalogue (David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, Jamie Sutcliffe), running from March to May 2025 at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK.

In fact, you can already get the online version of the scenario published by Zedeck on his blog.

But the campaign was a success and it should fund both the publications and the trip. I can’t wait to get the physical object.

I’m sorry I didn’t write a bit about this one a lot sooner as it is such a worthy campaign but I am glad to see they were completely successful and I would even hope to get over to see the exhibition in Nottingham during its run between March and May this year.

3. Glumdark

You know, there are a few companies/creators that I would probably back no matter what the project. In the case of Glumdark, it wasn’t the creators themselves but the company, Exalted Funeral. I’ve gotten a few things from them in the past, although I don’t buy from them much because of the shipping. They published Between the Skies, for instance, and I think it’s pretty clear that I like that a lot. So, when the Glumdark Kickstarter was repeatedly slung at my face from Instagram, I paid attention. I knew nothing about it but I took a punt. I am quite glad I did.

Glumdark started as a website. It was built as a resource for GMs running dark fantasy games. It’s got a plethora of useful tables . You can go and check them out right here, at glumdark.com. What’s nice is that you have tables for GMs, of course, but also for players.

As a dungeon master, you may choose to punish your players with some fresh doom, or just amuse yourself with the joy of randomness. As a player, you can expand your backstory or seek inspiration for new adventures.

It’s system-agnostic, making it equally useful as a resource to players of D&D 5e and Troikans alike.

Here’s a few of my favourite things from the site:

  • The Location Generator is probably the best bit for me. You can click on a location name such as, “A Mysterious Tower,” and you will get three paragraphs about such a place under the headings of “The tower,” “The access,” and “The occupants.” If you are not a big fan of any given paragraph, for instance, if you don’t like the description of the tower itself, “A tower built from stacked round stones in a dense, loamy forest,” then you can just click on it to generate a new one. Or you can just click on the Location name again to generate a whole new tower. Go and try it out!
  • The “Bad Omens” table starts with this entry at number 1: “A black cat starts to cross your path, but is crushed by a falling ladder.”
  • Number 13 on the d20 “Defining Life Events” table is: “You bear the mark of Goonfun, the savior.”

So, now they’re making a book with similar goodies in it, along with some art that is very pretty indeed, in a nasty sort of way. It’s also going to come with a soundtrack! Here’s the Kickstarter page.

4. A Feast for a Sphinx

I just really like Evelyn Moreau’s art style. I have been following her on Instagram for a while and now on Bluesky and I’m always delighted by the work she shares. And she has been pretty prolific. Just go have a look at her itch.io page here. The only piece of TTRPG work I knew, though, was Goblin Mail, for Troika! And it is a really original work with a fun premise and beautiful design elements. So, when she announced her new Kickstarter project with the same collaborators, Sofia Ramos (writing) and Luna P (layout,) I obviously backed it.

A Feast for a Sphinx is an adventure for Mörk Borg. Now, I have yet to run a Mörk Borg game but that didn’t stop me. It is a revamp of a dungeon formerly published on itch and the promise is that

Everything was rewritten, balanced or added to make this the best version of the module while keeping the central idea the same.

It is going to be produced in a zine format of 30 to 40 pages (which is on the long side for a zine.) It will describe the dungeon and deliver some new creatures, adventure seeds and a bunch of tables for randomly generating encounters, rumours, etc. Go have a look at the campaign page here.

5. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork

So, I was very suspicious of this one, I’ll be honest. I’ve read most of the Discworld novels, and I know the irreverent, comedic, satirical tone Terry Pratchett set. I never felt like you could really replicate that at the gaming table, exactly. No, that’s not true. It’s one of my favourite ways to play RPGs, in fact. I like to have fun with them. Puns come as second nature on dungeon crawls, silly NPC names are my bread and butter. My worry was more that it would seem somehow forced or unnatural if that’s what the game was explicitly trying to get you to do.

As the campaign went on, though, I began to think the creators understood that worry. To prove it, Modiphius did one of the bravest things I have seen in some time, they made an actual play to show off the game. It couldn’t have been in any sort of finished format at the time they released the video, but clearly they had enough to make a fun and funny one-shot. Now, they had some of the more recognisable faces on the RPG actual play scene involved, which helped. Quinns of Quinns Quest was the GM and the players were Josephine McAdam, Abubakar Salim and Liv Kennedy. Go and check out the video on Youtube here. They really managed to highlight the ways in which the rules encourage play that will generate genuinely comedic moments without it feeling like you’re being fed a bunch of “hilarious” prompts.

Anyway, that got me to back this one. And I wasn’t the only one to back it, dear reader, oh no. They raised almost two and a half million pounds! Whew! Can’t wait to get my hands on it in the summer. In the meantime, go take a look at its Kickstarter page here.

6. Royal Blood – A Tarot Heist RPG

I wrote that I would back almost anything from some creators. This is another one of those. It’s Rowan Rook and Decard. I’m an unashamed shill for Grant Howitt and don’t really need any reasons to buy something he’s involved with. But this game looks so beautiful as well. It’s a tarot based game.

Royal Blood is a tabletop roleplaying game about heists, tarot cards, magic, fate and desperation. It uses a deck of tarot cards to build characters, plan a heist and determine opposition, and to resolve every risky action the players make in an attempt to claim power.

This game has actually been around since 2016 but it was not crowdfunded or given much support by RRD either for that matter. This time, the kickstarter campaign did really well so they have some money to throw at it and they have a partnership with Mana Project Studio, the Italian TTRPG creators who are responsible for some of the best looking games out there, including Cowboy Bebop.

As for all of these projects but Solarcrawl, the Royal Blood campaign is over but you should still go and check out the Kickstart page here. You can actually pre-order it there now too.

The Theatre of Trophy Gold

Getting my flash in

Orlen, dusty, wide-brimmed chapeau drowning her alarming eyes in shadow, holds aloft her trophy, beaming. The bag of coin, pleasingly hefty, dangling from her dextrous digits. “‘Aah ‘baht ‘at ‘en?” Her companions, ensorcelled by something above her sturdy, sinister shoulder, point. A hiss, as a punctured bladder, sounds in her ear. Speculative, her left hand shoots up, ready to throttle the looming serpent. It narrowly misses losing its ring finger as a dagger, recently released by Rasei, skewers the snake to the formerly coin-concealing statue. Orlen chances a glance. The cold blood dribbles down the stone man’s shoulder, over the sickle he holds dramatically crossing his sword over his chest. Nima cries, “More snakes!” Time to go. The treasure hunters scarper down the path of the sickle, ignoring the sword’s point and the keep slouching beyond it on the horizon, hoping for Hester’s Mill.

A dramatic retelling of the opening scene of our recent game of Trophy Gold, run by friend of the blog, Isaac. To those who were there, apologies. I’m sure I got a few details wrong, either deliberately or by mistake. Drama seems appropriate for this fascinating game, defined as it is, within Sets.

Trophy

So, as you probably know, dear reader, if you have been with me for a while, here on the dice pool dot com, I am a more-or-less avid listener of the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast from the Gauntlet. I wrote a post on my appreciation for it and the Indie RPG Podcast last Summer. Our path to playing this incursion (as Trophy scenarios are called) leads very much from that. Jason Cordova, one of the podcast’s capable hosts, rarely ventures into the OSR’s hex-defined landscapes. Rather, you can generally find him in the narrative woods and trails of story-based games. On the podcast, he often discusses his experiences in running OSR (or just old tbh) modules in other systems. Back in the olden days of Fear of a Black Dragon, this generally meant either the incredibly rules-lite World of Dungeons or Dungeon World My last post on this blog was about the feelings Dungeon World made me feel. Go and have a look!) These both have PBTA DNA. Their mechanics lend themselves more to the application of imagined narrative than cut-and-dried, D&D-esque, result-binary systems. And this is really only because of the inclusion of a third option, a mixed success, or success at a cost. Since the implied consequence cannot be defined outside the context of the situation, it is usually left up to those at the table to invent it (although Dungeon World generally provides far more pre-written options than does the baldly efficient text of World of Dungeons.) And look, if you’re a PBTA maven, my deepest apologies for what is, no doubt, a faintly condescending and largely inaccurate paring down of a game system that is probably the most influential in the indie game space of the last decade and a half. But if you were raised on a distilled diet of Borgs in your old schools, you’re welcome.

I have gotten off track. The point I was trying to get to was that, a few years ago, Jason switched to running pretty much every module in Trophy Dark or Trophy Gold instead. Mostly Trophy Gold, in fact. Obviously, this got me very interested in the game. The idea of running D&D style modules in a more narrative style highlights a whole new facet of the hobby that I always thought would be very fun to explore. And, after reading a bit about the game and learning of its mechanical descent from Blades in the Dark I wanted to try it even more. It just turns out that, much like Tom (with Dungeon World,) before him, Isaac got there before me. I’m not complaining. I love being a player in these games.

So, to put it briefly, both Trophy games were written by Jesse Ross and published by Gauntlet Publishing. Elements of the rules have been adapted from Blades in the Dark by John Harper, who is also responsible for World of Dungeons and other elements were cribbed from Graham Walmsley’s seminal Cthulhu Dark. They are games about treasure hunters going out into the dark forest to find gold and bring it home so they can continue to survive in a hostile world. In Trophy Dark, your vile little adventurer is a goner; you’re not making it past the end of the session. Sorry. That’s the point of Trophy Dark. But in Trophy Gold you make a treasure hunter who might live to the end of the incursion if you’re lucky. They might even weasel their way through to another one. Speaking of which, I wrote a blog post about making a Trophy Gold character last summer. You may find it illuminating if you’re interested. Do bear in mind, though, the game I used in that post is not quite the same as the one presented in the book published in 2022. I used the game from the Codex Gold magazine, which you can pick up for a steal over on Drivethru. I don’t think there are any really drastic rule changes but we noticed some discrepancies in a few of the tables.

A gold and black illustration of an adventurer being lowered on a rope into a dark cave where a giant spider awaits. the cover is framed by stylised black spiders on a gold background. The words, Codex, The Gauntlet's monthly RPG zine appear in the top left of the cover.
The cover of Codex Gold from Gauntlet Publishing

Hester’s Mill

So, what’s all this about Sets? You didn’t think I remembered mentioning that earlier, did you, dear reader? Well, Incursions are formatted in a very particular way. Trophy Gold helpfully breaks it up and introduces the format like this:

  • Theme – much like any dramatic work that might be presented on the stage, a Trophy Gold incursion should be built around a theme, even if you are adapting it from another type of module. I would call the broad theme of Hester’s Mill to be “Harvest”
  • Sets – these are particular locations in which the treasure hunters will be presented with clear goals. I find it fascinating that the rules tell the GM to make the goal explicit to the players. I’m not giving away too much by telling you that the goal in the opening Set I wrote up in the intro is to find the way to Hester’s Mill. You complete the Set by achieving this goal and this is eminently important to the cycle of play. You may not wish to complete the goal of every Set. It might not be clever or necessary for you. Your character’s overall goal is to earn enough Gold to relieve them of their Burden, both of which are abstract scores on the character sheet. In other words, you know from the start how much you need to take home so you don’t die on the streets or get consumed by the evils of the world. I don’t think anyone would blame you for trying to convince the party to get the heck out of there once you had managed to collect enough money. But, just because you got your Benjamins, doesn’t mean everyone else did. This can lead to inter-personal conflict, unsurprisingly. But it might also lead to moments of support and kindness in these Sets. Drama, gettit? And guess what you call the things you find within the Sets… Yep, Props. It’s obvious, really. So the statue of the man with the sickle and sword in the intro? Yep, that’s a Prop. You also have Treasure and Traps as defined elements within Sets
  • Flowchart – What the holy business-process, Batman? Yep, it makes so much sense, when you think about it. When you are trying to play something like an OSR module, you might have a map which visually represents the location but that does not necessarily represent the decisions, actions and repercussions that might lead the PCs from one Set to the next. In many ways, the Flowchart is the more useful of the two. I’d like to give it a go in any game where I’m running a particular scenario, honestly. Not very theatrical though, disappointingly
  • Monsters – these are specifically mentioned because the section I am referring to in the Trophy Gold rules from Codex Gold is there to explain how you might convert an OSR module to be played using Trophy Gold instead. So, Jesse Ross has helpfully provided a lot of advice on converting Monsters, a staple of the genre, to be used in that system. One of the most fascinating aspects of the game is that the monsters do not come pre-named. That is left up to the party. This can be either cool AF or disastrous. The monsters we encountered in Hester’s Mill so far have been both bonkers and horrifying. And if it had been left up to me, they would have been called something stupid
  • Magic – Similar to Monsters, this includes advice on conversion. But, I will say that there is a very useful table of already converted D&D style spells presented in the rules for you to use.

Anyway, it should be clear that the Set is the main denomination of organisational structure within an Incursion. So far, I think we have interacted with three or four Sets in Hester’s Mill and achieved the Goal in two or three of them. You can use another highly abstracted currency, the Hunt Token, to complete a Set without having to actually face its dangers. You can receive (and also lose) these tokens on a Hunt Roll, one of the three types of rolls in the game. If you spend three Hunt Tokens like that, you simply draw the curtain across the stage and open again on the next Set and get to work on the new goal.

In general, rolls, of which you have Hunt, Combat and Risk, are made using a dice pool mechanic much like that used in Blades in the Dark. The D6 is the only die you need but you will need them in Dark and Light varieties. You will always roll a Dark Die in Combat and you can roll one to give you a better chance of success on a Risk Roll if you’re willing to risk mind or body… More drama.

The Combat Roll is particularly fascinating because it doesn’t work like a regular success/failure roll at all. Instead, you describe how your character exposes themselves to harm in the battle and then roll your Light Die. That number is your Weak Point. You then roll a Dark Die for each of the treasure hunters in the fight. Ostensibly, you’re rolling against the Endurance of the Monster, but, if any of them roll your Weak Point, that increases your Ruin, which is like a harm track. One you hit 6 Ruin, you are Lost… So dramaaaatic, right?

Add to this the Devil’s Bargain, nicked from Blades in the Dark and you have a recipe for some real dark character moments in Trophy games. You crowdsource the possible options for both Devil’s Bargains and unfortunate consequences of failed rolls from everyone around the table and this makes for some extremely fucked up inevitabilities on a lot of rolls.

In conclusion

We have yet to finish Hester’s Mill. I know we have at least one more Set to get to. I’m really looking forward to going back to it. We’ll be dealing with the aftermath of something pretty messed up and, hopefully, finding some more goodies. I have to say, the Incursion has been very pleasing in introducing us to a lot of lore and cool fantasy history while also giving us the opportunity to get into fights and burn down shrines so far. With any luck, there’ll be more of that as we wrap it up next time.

How about you, dear reader? Have you played Trophy Gold? Or Hester’s Mill? What did you think?

The Feeling of Dungeon World

Hirelings to Heroes

My good friend Tom. recently kicked off a Dungeon World campaign. I’m a player in it. It’s got a very particular flavour and premise that places the players in the position of being the hirelings of the “real” adventuring party. And so it was at the start. But, before we had a chance to yell, “WATCH OUT FOR THAT FLESHY BOI MAN THING” the tables were turned and the PCs had to dig deep and find something heroic inside themselves or have the entire group die horrible deaths in the depths of the first dungeon. I would like to give a big shout-out to Tom’s awesome in media res beginning in a massive organic mouth with eyes on the inside and little flesh monsters. It rocked.

My character is Craobh Beag (pronounced something like Kreev Byug), a Kyrfolk (think minotaur whose bull half was a Highland) druid. Had a lot of fun with the shapeshifting and his generally chaotic nature. You can check out Tom’s post about how they built the world we’re playing in here.

A shaggy, red-haired straight horned cow in a field.
This is what my Dungeon World character looks like except with two legs and more vines. Highland cow by Nilfanion – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7868883

Old School?

But what I want to write about today is what the game evoked for me. As a player of a certain age, my first introduction to RPGs was the red D&D boxed set back in the late eighties. This was fairly normal at the time, as I understand it. It really was magic. I don’t remember too much of the mechanics of playing that game. My memory is reliably questionable. But I have a distinct memory of the feeling of it. The wonder of imagining my little dwarf swinging his wee hammer at monsters in some unnamed dungeon, having real adventures! I’d played choose your own adventure books like Fighting Fantasy and Zork before but this was entirely different. There was no way of save-scumming by keeping a finger on the decision entry page so you could go back if you didn’t like the outcome. The consequences felt consequential and the world was wide open. No limits!

When I think of old school games, I think these are the feelings they should elicit. Fear of threat, concern for real consequences, appreciation of truly impactful decisions, a sense of freedom in an open world and an enjoyment of the fantastic. I want to be fearful for the life of my character. I need to know that the decisions I make can have a truly terrible or wonderful impact on the world in some way. Now, there are a lot of differing opinions out there as to what constitutes an OSR principle. Some of them involve the inclusion of resource management, others disregard that as non-essential but insist that they should be ‘rules-lite.’ Anyway, let’s take this list I lifted from Wikipedia that comes originally from Matthew Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008.)

  • Rulings from the gamemaster are more important than rule books. Concoct a clever plan and let the gamemaster rule on it.
  • Player skill is more important than character abilities. Outwit the enemy, don’t simply out-fight them.
  • Emphasize the heroic, not the superheroic. Success lies in experience, not superpowers.
  • Game balance is not important. If the characters meet a more powerful opponent, either think of a clever plan or run away.

I think we can see that these four pillars of OSR games cover a lot of the feelings I want to get out of them. A sense of the fantastic is noticeably absent. But that might be something specific to me.

Dungeon World (2012) by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel supports this type of play so well. It ticks all these OSR boxes! Now, obviously, I have only played the one session of it so far, but I have to tell you, the first of the stars I sent to Tom after that session was this:

right at the top I have to say that this is the closest I feel I’ve gotten to experiencing the feeling of playing old school dnd in a very long time. Despite the system being slightly different, it’s close enough that it feels familiar. More importantly, it’s the overall atmosphere [Tom] has created with a pretty traditional dungeon scenario with puzzles and traps in a recognizable fantasy setting. It really brought me back.

It’s an odd duck, Dungeon World. It is very much a PBTA game. You have bonds and moves and holds and degrees of success/success with consequences when you roll your 2d6. But you also have D&D’s core abilities, alignment, HP and magic spells. You even have classes like Dungeons & Dragons. The standard races are human, elf, dwarf and halfling (Tom has tweaked the list of available races or cultures in their campaign. Once again, you can read more about that in their own words here.) So, this is how it retains the flavour of D&D without the ruleset. LaTorra and Koebel could have made a dungeon exploration game that was far more Apocalypse Worldy. I mean, do you really need the D&D style stats? No. Is alignment necessary? No. But we are trained to understand that the fiction presented by those things is reminiscent of a particular type of game that we want to experience the feeling of again. Well, that goes for those of us who have had that feeling before. For others, who maybe never played anything but PBTA games and are loathe to dip their toes into OSE or DCC or even actual D&D, it offers them a chance to do that.

So we were on a storm-wreathed cliff-side, and we were being led by a ghost dog we had just befriended. The ghost dog walked through the air to the other side of the cliffs as though the rope-bridge was still standing. But the bridge had been cut in the middle. Still, we knew the undead doggie was trying to direct us to where we needed to be, so we used a combination of moves (shapeshifting into a forest bird), equipment (lots of rope, which our paladin ended up losing as a consequence of his actions) and luck (mixed success) to make it across to the other side (even though the self-same paladin decided it would be clever to tightrope walk across and nearly plummeted to a nasty death as a result.) This one scene involved most of the pillars of the OSR that I quoted above.

Old as new

Sometimes I find I just have to write about games like this, that are brand new to me, even though they have been out for over a decade. I’ve done it with OSE and Dragon Age too. This might seem a little redundant to some, but the way I look at it is that, if it’s new to me, it’s new to someone else too. I have to remind myself that somebody discovers OD&D every day. I only first tried a PBTA game about three years ago. When it comes to RPGs, there are trends and movements and there is always something new coming out. And there are quite a few people publishing articles on them. But I don’t think that any reason not to write about games like this that I am enjoying and enthusiastic about right now, no matter how old.

Dear reader, we have literally, only just begun our Dungeon World adventure and I am hoping to write more about it and the other games I’m currently involved in over the next few weeks. There are so many! I am looking forward, next, to discussing Trophy Gold, run by Isaac, and a new project/event that Tables and Tales is cooking up too. So stick around for more!

Flash Fiction Challenge Week 5: Subscribe to Life!

Enshittification

I think we all know the feeling, right? Like, whenever the word-processing software you bought for a flat fee decides to switch to a subscription service so you can’t save any files on it without shelling out 7.99 a month? Or when you need to sign up for a free delivery service from the worst company in the world just so you can watch the latest season of Star Trek? Yeah.

Anyway, that’s what this week’s flash is about. There is no hidden meaning or anything. It’s just straight-forward anti-enshittification propaganda. Enjoy!

This is a flash fiction challenge where I challenge myself and anyone else who cares to take part to write a 500 word flash fiction piece every week. I generate five random nouns and five random verbs for each piece. Part of the challenge is to include all the words in the piece. Here are the words for this piece.

Nouns

Session
Nature
Wood
Guest
Membership

Verbs

Dominate
Slow
Forbid
Get
Dictate

Subscribe to Life!

By Ronan McNamee

You roll up to your spot in the Elysian Woods Outdoor Living Simulation Centre and unroll your tent. You hit the Temporary Habitable Structure Instantaneous Construction button on the remote you received in your first Kampzite subscription box and your tent lies there, a useless, Permanent, Uninhabitable Chaos Slowly just existing. You check your phone. In your latest fit of anti-capitalistic pique the night before, you canceled your Danube subscription. It seems, when you did that, Kampzite, Bafftime, Fudz and even Lurollx went with it. You attempt to construct it with your hands. You receive a text message from Kampzite. It is a friendly reminder that interfering with Kampzite property is an offense and that any further tampering will result in the police being summoned and a hefty fine. A moment later you get another text, this time from Danube, this one much less friendly.

A week spent in the wondrous glory of nature. Too much to ask.

You attempt to restart your Danube subscription right then but you had bravely deleted all account credentials from your phone when you cancelled your subscription. You lock yourself out completely, trying to log in with incorrect passwords. You use up the last of your data subscription credits in the process. There are no Elysian Woods colleagues anywhere.

You fold up your “tent” and pop it in your boot. Frustrated, you ask your
EV to take you to the nearest hostelry so you don’t have to sleep in the car. Sleeping in your car is outside the fair use policy you signed up for in your EZ-EV subscription.

You slow, passing the sign. Gaia’s Gardens: Subscription Retreat. Maybe you’ll be eligible for a guest membership. Your EV chimes. You have exited the area covered by your EZ-EV contract. The car lights dim and it rolls to a halt. Wondering how you found yourself in a life utterly dominated by which services you subscribe to, you slide out and onto the road.

You begin to dictate this story to an app on your phone. The app refuses to save it on your free plan.

Gaia’s gates forbid you entry. There is no guard house, there is no intercom. There is only a camera. You peer through the fence into paradise. Forest gives way, beyond, to cold brew coffee houses and hot yoga sessions, to silent discos and loud wind sounds, to glamping. Desperate, you climb that fence, rattling and trembling as you summit before plummeting to the piney floor below.

You awake to pain. Your back. It’s bad. But there’s your phone on the floor nearby. You call emergency services. “Danube Heightened Experience Response Services. Your account number please.” You laugh into the receiver. “Your account number please,” repeats the AI voice. Another voice from the trees, “Hi there, our facial recognition cameras can’t seem to identify you. Would you mind telling us your Gaia Gardens Subscription Credential Code?” The Emergency Services voice says, “Danube Police have been dispatched, please remain where you are.”

Next week

I have been running this challenge for five weeks now and I feel as though I have gotten enough out of it. It has spurred me to write more fiction and has gotten those creative juices flowing (isn’t that a dreadful idiom?) Anyway, I’m going to focus on writing more RPG related posts for a few weeks and I might come back to the flash later in the year.

The Dice Pool at One Hundred (Posts)

Progress

The last time I wrote a post like this one was waaaaay back on post number 30. That was a mere month after I started thedicepool.com. I used it as a sort of check-in with myself. I decided, at that point to quit posting daily as a way to make this more sustainable and to increase quality at the expense of quantity. I thought, at the time, that I would be able to spend days working on a single blog-post, researching, editing and polishing. In practice, that has happened only rarely. Normally, I spend most of the week skiving and then, with my self-imposed deadline looming I pull on my blogger’s hat, think of a topic and wheel my office chair up to my desk to actually write it in an hour or two.

I do wish I could more consistently plan, write, edit and post. Mainly because, the posts where I have done that are usually the ones I’ve been most proud of. I would include my series on Between the Skies, and the post about my experience with After the Mind the World Again. Both of these prompted their creators to contact me directly and After the Mind the World Again got a mention from Thomas Manuel on the Indie RPG Newsletter making it my most viewed post by a pretty wide margin. So, I’m going to redouble my efforts to spend more time on posts to produce something I can be more proud of.

Saying that, I am happy with some of the progress I have made with the Dice Pool Dot Com. Joining the Wood-paneled Web Ring run by Stu Horvath or Vintage RPG fame, was really cool. I would love to see more sites join Wood-paneled actually, as I really believe in it as a less corporate form of online community-building. If you’re reading this, dear reader, and you have a site that you think would be a good fit, go check out the web ring at the link above and contact Stu for an invite. I know he’d be thrilled to add a new member.

As well as that, I may not have won any prizes, but I was happy to be a part of the 2024 Bloggies. I think the dice pool came in about 7th place in the Debut Blog category, which, having read the other entrants who came higher than me, felt about right, to be honest. In fact, it was the exposure to all of these amazing blogs by people with similar interests and the desire to write about them was the best part of the Bloggies adventure for me. It got me thinking about the sorts of topics I’d like to write about, gave me ideas for riffing off other bloggers’ posts and made me think about the value of blogging in general. By the way, Clayton Notestine of the Explorer’s Design blog won the overall Platinum Medal for this post: The 1 HP Dragon. You should go and read that and subscribe to his awesome blog. Some really thought-provoking ideas in it. While you’re at it, go and check out Murkmail, who won the Debut Blog prize. They have grown enormously during 2024 and the blog is well worth a read.

What a week!

I say I want to spend more time working on blog posts, but, if I continue to have week’s like this one, I’m not sure how I could. Here was my gaming schedule for the past week:

  • Monday: The Darkest Dungeon board-game campaign in person
  • Tuesday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 0 – on Discord
  • Wednesday: Dragon Age RPG, Duty Unto Death in person in our local game shop, Replay
  • Thursday: Dungeons and Dragons: Scatterjammer online
  • Friday: Dungeon World: Hirelings to Heroes Session 1 in person
  • Saturday: Trophy Gold: Hester’s Mill Session 0/1 in person

That’s six gaming sessions in the last week if you include the Darkest Dungeon game, which, obviously, is not an RPG. But I make the rules around here and I say it counts. I have loved it, honestly. It’s obviously not sustainable and something’s got to give, but I got so much from all of these. Some nights I might have been a bit tired or just not feeling it. But here’s a thing I learned a long time ago: playing games is a form of relaxation. It’s fun, or, at least, it’s supposed to be. Even on nights where I was at a low ebb, the game would actually make me feel a whole lot better than just sitting in front of the TV.

This sort of week would not be possible without Tables and Tales. All of these games were with members of our small but dedicated local RPG community. If I look back at the last year and consider the best thing I have achieved it would be Tables and Tales. Obviously, while acknowledging the fact that this was a team effort from the start and not even my idea. That credit goes to Isaac and Tom. I have been very proud of whatever meagre contributions I have managed to add. Dear reader, if you are an RPG enthusiast and you don’t feel like you get enough opportunities to get a group around an actual table I can’t recommend this enough. We started with a small group of friends but then I advertised for players for a game on the local game shop’s Discord. That was the proto-community along with Tom and Isaac and some of their own friends and workmates. We set up our own Discord to announce games and get members to sign up. From that point members invited other friends and family and before we knew it, we had enough people to allow us to play games six nights a week.

As for the games themselves, I have discussed some of them at length already. My experiments continue with my Spelljammer campaign. Most recently, I have started to use the tables in Between the Skies to come up with some weird space shit to throw at the PCs. I’ll write about that once I give it a chance to percolate a little bit. I just recently wrote about our Dragon Age game. It is likely to be wrapped up in a couple of weeks. Might see about continuing into a campaign with this band of Grey Warden recruits though. As for Trophy Gold and Dungeon World; these are both brand new to me and the group. So far, after one full session of each, I can say I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them. I have a lot of thoughts and I’ll definitely be blogging about them soon. The Darkest Dungeon campaign has had trouble getting going but we’re trying to stick to a schedule now. It’s tough and unforgiving and gives me a lot of OSRy ideas.

Dear reader, if you have stuck around for the last one hundred posts, thanks! I appreciate your patronage. Go tell a friend about thedicepool.com and then come back to enjoy the next hundred.

Flash Fiction Challenge Week 4: He Told Us

The news

Art is political. I might struggle to call what I make “art” most of the time but I guess, whether it’s good or bad, it’s still art. Some of it is more overtly political than others. You can certainly see the politics in NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels. It bristles and boils up and breaks the world, but it is still veiled by its fantasy setting. When you read her Great Cities books, based, as they are in her very real home of New York City, the place and the politics are the real deal. It’s right there on the page; the shit that people deal with every day even it is couched in fantastical occurrences and the antagonists are disguised behind cosmically horrific metaphor.

Usually, what I write lies in the former category but, today’s flash is jumping right out of the headlines. It came unbidden, I will say, but here it is. Take it for what it’s worth.

This is a flash fiction challenge where I challenge myself and anyone else who cares to take part to write a 500 word flash fiction piece every week. I generate five random nouns and five random verbs for each piece. Part of the challenge is to include all the words in the piece. Here are the words for this piece.

Nouns

crusade
cluster
drawer
railcar
turkey

Verbs

permit
stop
spring
control
fuck 1

He Told Us

by Ronan McNamee

He told us to permit no Rykerites. Neither should we tolerate a Jellicho to live amongst us. For we were the people of the one true god! Kark!

We joined together in a great convocation. We occupied Scotte Station and created of the railcars an impassable barrier. That’s how the Rylerites came to our great city, like diseased cells through the arteries of a body. We watched the trains burn from the terminal.

He told us to take back control so our crusade abandoned the useless railway and spread to the spokes of our great metropolis, the bridges. Those who could, exploded them, the rest of us smashed them, rammed them, blocked and burned them. No more Jenwayers coming across those bridges.

Finally, together on our island of freedom, we beat down doors, beat on drums, beat those damned heathens, the Forgistas. They didn’t belong here either.

He told us to clean the city and that’s what we did. We sprung traps for all the unwanted. We clustered them all in Liberty Gardens and watched them bobbing around in there, like livestock, like turkeys. We fenced them in and went home for dinner.

He told us to eat what the city produced. So we opened our pantries and explored the recesses of our drawers. We ate ketchup and pickles until our tongues fizzed and stung. We drank old soda and energy drinks until our teeth throbbed and our brains balked.

We looked across the barricades and threw obscenities at the filthy outsiders beyond. We returned to Liberty Gardens. The Rykerites and Jellichos had run out of condiments and own-brand cola. They lay in the dirt and we licked our lips.

He told us not to stop until they were gone. So we started and did not cease until we picked our teeth. We were free of them then. Or were we? Some of our crusaders continued to subsist on mayo and sherbet. They refused the “turkey.” They went back to their lives. Sympathisers. Vegetarians. Fuck them.

He told us to find the traitors and destroy them, hang them from the bridges and the tallest skyscrapers. And we did, though we kept a few to make up for the last of the city food. Great Kark would not begrudge his favoured people a good meal.

The eyes of the traitors looked down on us, as we basked in the streets, satiated. And I heard him tell the others to take us for anti-city behaviour. We ran and cried but finally obeyed the leader. We gave ourselves to the great people of our city and they fenced us in, fed us stale donuts and old olives until we lay in the dirt, doing what we were told until they came for us with belief and hunger in their eyes. Had Kark abandoned me? Was I no better than a Forgista now? I always did what I was told. Was this a reward?

He told us what he was, but we never listened.

Next week’s words

Here are the five nouns and five verbs to fit into next week’s piece:

Next week’s nouns

session
nature
wood
guest
membership

Next week’s verbs

dominate
slow
forbid
get
dictate

Happy writing!

Death and Troika!

Whole-Hearted goodbye

The death of a PC in a role playing game might be something to mourn, it might be something to celebrate, it might be something assiduously avoided, it might even be something to seek out. But I think there’s one thing for certain: it’s almost always memorable.

When I think about the death of a PC there is a high-water mark for me. Heart is a game that builds up to that ultimate beat from the get-go. Your character’s death (or end at least) baked into the character creation system. The Zenith Abilities generally come in only two or three flavors and one of those is going to be the way your fucked-up little guy says goodbye. And yes, I know it‘s possible for a Heart character to die before their Zenith Ability goes off, but that’s only with the consent of the player. And, from my experience, the player really wants to make it to that finale. It is the greatest treasure they can obtain in the game. It is truly, all about them and how they do it. As the endgame hoves into view in Heart, the players are planning how they will work their big moment into the fiction and the GM is paddling away frantically like a murderous swan, to ensure it happens for them. And when the two meet in the middle? When player and GM both realize the ambition to achieve the perfect end? Chef’s kiss. One of the best feelings I have had playing any RPG, honestly.

And then there’s Troika!

Three adventurers protected by a magic shield against a hail of arrows. One of them takes an arrow to the back of the head though…
That’s gotta hurt. Art by Andrew Walken from Whalgravaak’s Warehouse.

We haven’t played much Troika. I ran three players through the hotel-based adventure, the Blancmange and Thistle, from the core Troika book last year. We did it as a one-shot and it was so surreal and hilarious that I knew I wanted to play more. So, in the summer, I thought I would give Whalgravaak’s Warehouse a go. Since then, we have lost one player (who moved to Spain, don’t worry) and two PCs. Please bear in mind, there have only been four sessions exploring the chaotic and bizarre workplace so far. We have lost one PC in each of the last two sessions! Tim got smashed and burned in an encounter with a blood sucking crimson giant (one of the warehouse staff) and Borrowick Grimpkin got got in an encounter with some wizardly loaders. So, this seems like a high lethality rate, right?

I think Troika has a fairly tough rule for character death. Essentially, if you go to zero Stamina (Health) and another PC comes to your aid in the same round, you have a chance of survival. This is particularly nerve-wracking for the incapacitated PC since Troika initiative is random. Each player and enemy gets a certain number of tokens and they all go into a bag at the start of each round along with one other token that, when drawn, means the end of the round. So you never know when it’s going to be your turn or when it’s going to be the end of the round! Add to this the fact that, if you go into negative stamina, you’re instantly killed, and I think you can see what I mean. On top of that, there is no way to increase your Stamina so you will always be exactly as squishy as you are at the start of the game, unless you add armor.

A warrior bleeds from the eyes and mouth as he is assaulted by some other dimensional horror.
I don’t know how to describe this one.

For poor Tim and Borrowick, they were beyond help, insta-dead, no coming back. Some of the enemies in Troika can do so much damage that they are not unlikely to one-shot the average adventurer. And that is the way the game is built. At least, that’s what I am coming to understand. You have to make the most of the time you have with your characters because it’s going to be a good time, not a long time.

Another thing I have come to understand is that, even in a game where your character’s end is not necessarily the goal, and not something you plan for, you can still have a good one that feels right and satisfying. After their character’s death, each of the players highlighted it as a major star of the session! The shock and the surprise element of their endings, in fights that seemed both unexpected and momentous, not to mention, in true Troika fashion, bizarre and unique, left them happy with how they went out.

I’d like to take this opportunity to share the obituaries I wrote up for each of them. I shared these in the general chat on our Tables and Tales Discord. After the second one in a row went up, we all agreed we needed a new channel entitled Fallen Heroes Obituaries. And that has been a big hit!

Tim

We lost a good one last night. Tim leaves behind his beloved gremlin-terrier, Brutus and fellow worthy adventurers, Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin. He had an illustrious career as a gremlin catcher before ever setting foot into Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. He had once managed to trip up one of Troika’s oversized citizens in the city’s renowned Gianttown district. This caused massive property damage but he still managed to capture the gremlin he was chasing at the time. In the warehouse Tim faithfully executed the wishes of his erstwhile patron, Exultant Wulf Memnemenoch by bludgeoning to death the alien cacogen known only as the Opportunist. Unfortunately, it was a member of staff of the warehouse that laid low the heroic gremlin catcher. He died bravely clubbing another giant, an enormous, crimson, vampiric one named Paude. And no doubt, his sacrifice was deeply appreciated by Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin as they accidentally but poignantly cremated his body just as the ancient warriors did for their honoured dead.

Borrowick Grimpkin

We lost another brave soul last night. Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard-hunter extraordinaire, known across Troika City for his exploits in infiltrating and despatching an entire wizarding cult of Muhtrenex the Rufescent, Gulper of Blood, met his end. Despite having fulfilled his mission to slay the cacogen Opportunist, he and his team-mates continued in their exploration of Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. It was there that he was predeceased by his companion Tim in the battle with Paude the vampire giant. The circumstances of Borrowick Grimpkin’s passing were, in many ways, that of a workplace accident, impaled, as he was by the forklift arm of a rusty humanoid loader with the oxidised face of the wizard who created it. If it were not for the fact that, by his actions, his crate pilfering friends, Ba’Naana and Sticky Nicky were afforded the opportunity to escape, that might be how his death was recorded. Instead we can proudly state that Borrowick Grimpkin died as he lived, performing a dangerously acrobatic jumping sword attack from two stories up on a man made entirely of metal. RIP.

How does your group handle PC death, dear reader? Do they celebrate it? Do they rage against it? Are they forgiving or do they hold a grudge?