Tag: Tabletop RPG Ramblings

Star Trek Tech and Treknobabble

In this episode Hannah talks about Star Trek technology and the effects it could have on your RPG:

The image used in this blog was taken from https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=86466&picture=space-galaxy

Coinage in Our Smoke & Snow Game

As some of you may be aware, I’m going to be starting an OSE game in the next month (session 0 scheduled for the week after next as of time of writing), the game is going to be loosely based on the Colonial America time period and set in a New World of sub-arctic temperatures (think Northern Canada). Amongst the various things I’ve been considering (rules for blackpowder firearms, hex-crawls, etc) I’ve also been thinking about coinage. I’d love to be able to have something a bit more flavourful in our game but don’t want it to make things too difficult for the players or to have to draw up new cost lists for things.

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Friend or Foe Friday – Unicorns

In this Friend or Foe Friday episode Hannah and myself discuss that most mystical and fabulous of creatures, the unicorn.

Our Scum & Villainy Inspired Downtime & Content Generator for Midderlands

I’ve spoken in a couple of recent episodes of our podcast about the DT and Content Generation system that myself and Johannes Paavola adapted from Scum & Villainy for use in our ICRPG Midderlands game:

I wrote up the notes on this after our discussion in a form that I’ve been using for a couple of sessions in the Midderlands campaign, it’s not perfect but I wanted to share it here in-case anyone was interested:

ICRPG-Downtime-SystemDownload

You can see the sessions that we’ve played thus far using this system on our Youtube channel:

I don’t like Mondays – Campfire Tales

Shake off the Monday morning drudgery, come and gather close to the crackling camp fire as John and Hannah regale you with tales from their balmiest days.

Roleplay Will Eat Itself

The title of this article is intended to be a tongue-in-cheek reference, based around the name of the band Pop Will Eat Itself, I am not seriously suggesting that recent scandals are going to destroy roleplaying or anything needlessly dramatic like that. However, it has been pointed out to me that the humour may not have translated well in text so I thought I’d state it here explicitly. Thanks to Adam Ness for pointing this out.

I’ve just been reading a post on Tenkar’s Tavern (great site, as I’m sure you all know), and it seems that the RP community (and the old school community in particular) continues in it’s almost frantic attempts to tear itself apart in flurries of accusations, recriminations and censorship. I don’t normally comment on such things–since I prefer to put my efforts into producing stuff and running games–but there has been so much of this sort of stuff flying around recently that I felt compelled to write this post. This is most likely going to be my one and only comment on this.

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Appendix N (additional)

GEORGIAN MAPS OF LONDON

Since writing my Appendix N post discussing a book I’ve been reading concerning the Georgian era (you can read the post here), I’ve also been searching for maps and other interesting things related to the same era on the internet and thought I’d highlight a couple of the more interesting websites that I’ve stumbled across:

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A few things I’ve learnt about LOTFP low-level dungeon crawling

As you may or may not be aware, I’m currently running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign called Rose of Westhaven, the aim of the campaign was to get me some more experience at running OSR and also to do a game where old-school dungeon-crawling was a big part of it. Currently we’ve had a few sessions to establish a bit about the world background (you can find out more here in the player handout if you’re interested) and a couple of sessions ago the discovery of a corrupted and partially ruined Elven Temple lead to the characters encountering their first larger dungeon.

I’ve had great fun running the game, my players seem to be enjoying it and I’ve already learnt the following about low-level dungeon-crawling in LOTFP:

  • Low-level characters are extremely fragile, if even a basic human antagonist gets a lucky hit in during combat then someone is going down.
  • Healing is extremely hard to come by necessitating a lot of resting.
  • The importance of the Cleric cannot be overstated, that single cure light wounds spell can allow the party to continue for far longer than they otherwise might.
  • Having a 10′ pole to check for traps, along with lanterns and ample supplies of oil is an absolute necessity.
  • As a GM tracking how many turns the characters lanterns are going to be burning for (and knocking a turn off about every minute when they’re not in combat rounds) is actually perversely enjoyable.
  • Having people track rations and stuff like is far more important in a dungeon environment where the players can’t just pop into town and re-supply.

Engage Smug Mode

Or “why are so many people unwilling to play anything but D&D”?

 

I’ve just been reading a post on one of the online Facebook roleplaying groups that I’m a part of, where someone asked what seems like a fairly simple question: “What are the reasons that so many people are unwilling to play anything but D&D?”

Now, I’m not the worlds biggest fan of D&D–although I’ve played all but the earliest editions and have been looking with interest at some OSR stuff recently–but even as I was preparing a reply along the lines of “well there could be numerous reasons, visibility of the game line, it’s what their friends play, etc etc” a number of responses popped up that gave me serious pause for thought. I’m not saying that all of the responses were in this vein, but there were certainly a number of posts that suggested people who stuck with D&D were afraid to play other stuff, or were too self-conscious or were subterranean Morlocks crouching in basements fearing to step into the warming light of the cool new systems in town. Okay, I’m exaggerating on that last one, but you get the idea?

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