Traverse Fantasy

There was a Reddit user named Kubular who happened upon a novel way to determine damage in D&D combat when their friend had assumed that it was just the difference of their D20 roll minus the target’s armor class. Something similar happened to me a bit ago, before I switched to decision-based initiative from individual initiative ( as Dwiz referred to them ). My friends kept mixing up their initiative with their attack roll, not consciously, but just as an honest mistake when you have to keep doing shit with that D20. That was actually a partial motive for me in switching to my current approach because it felt more intuitive and maybe even ‘fairer’—but the misconception stuck with me. There are many ways to combine all those pesky combat rolls, and one of my favorites I had tried before was Nova’s approach of using damage dice , but isn’t it funny to stumble upon something new by accident? Like chocolate chip cookies (which I know weren’t really accidental but you get the point,...

Basically: I was inspired by Dwiz’s post about how ‘ the maze game ’ of charting sites was central to early D&D in contrast to later approaches which abstract or give knowledge of the map for players and their characters (contrast with Josh McCroo ’s approach which has the party receive a blank map—itself a fun method!), as well as an entry in Gumbo’s AD&D series about how maps in that game specifically facilitate fast travel while escaping a site or returning to deeper levels (i.e., it’s not just for the sake of note-taking). I doodled some rules I wanted to play with in my homebrew pirate game this weekend (AHEM Cinco! ) and Elmcat was very encouraging about what I had come up with. So here we are! Maybe Wuffus will consider this a late entry in the blogwagon. There are two resource items in my game which players can freely stock at havens before or during their adventure: rations (for recovering on the road) and ammo. Now I’m introducing a third called stationery . Ima...

I had started writing the below with high hopes, before I got kind of stuck thinking how awkward it would be for everyone to be a farmer and how difficult it would be to find a fun role for everyone. I’d still like to play with this sometime, and I do play solo a little bit, but for now I’m just putting this out there since others were curious and I don’t know if I have it in me right now to figure out where it’s going. The ‘Draft’ This is an outline of how I think my epistolary experiment inspired by the likes of Harvest Moon / Stardew Valley / Animal Crossing , which I’ll tentatively call Blue Moon , will play out. I think the frequency of play would be monthly, since if you played this with physical mail you’d want enough time for the letters to arrive from the mayor and back from each other participant. Seasons shift every three months. Characters will interface with the game through bonuses which sum up to +6 points total, and up to an individual maximum of +4 to start with. ...

Sorry to keep Cinco! -posting, but Alex from  To Distant Lands wrote a really fun addition to magic which I wanted to share and also slightly refactor: Metamagic When you work with another mage(s) to combine your powers into a new spell using the same motif, each of you pay one inspiration. All additional inspiration spent afterward is multiplied by the number of casters for the purpose of defining the effects of the spell. This is really cool and, I can imagine, produces the cool sort of scene where you get a crowd of mages casting a spell together. My first thought reading it was, oh geez, one of us needs to come up with ways to spend more inspiration (or at least scale up the rules that currently exist)! But that made me think: oh, maybe the approach is backward, and rather than multiplying effects we can treat it as a discount on combined effects. This is my revision: Multiple mages in one zone with complementary motifs may cast a spell cooperatively. Each ‘helper’ spen...

Alex from To Distant Lands had been considering Cinco! to play his Gran Carcosium setting (which I had played in a little bit ago !), and he asked me where I was at with feats since he wanted to play with that sort of approach. He wrote a couple of his own, which made me realize why I had been struggling with it on my end. My prior approach was to use feats to gatekeep specialized rules for characters, which was a fine thought, but I was too granular in splitting up and encapsulating those rules in feats. They didn’t have the pizzazz of, how Alex had put it, being excited to do something new and unique. So I consolidated those—from seven granular feats to just one feat for arcana rules and another for weapon rules—and had fun with all the rest. I hope these are more fun! I still haven’t played with feats because when I asked some of my friends how they felt about them, they preferred having a minimal character sheet and letting me handle the rules stuff—which is real and why I’m h...

I really like Eldritch Fields ’ table for encounter activities , but I wanted to simplify it so that I don’t need an entirely different set of indices for sentient vs non-sentient creatures. Instead, roll D20 below; for non-sentient creatures, subtract 10 if the roll exceeds 10. D20 What’s Up? 1–2 Dead 3–4 Resting 5–6 Foraging 7–8 Examining 9–10 Sparring 11–12 Traveling 13–14 Camping 15–16 Working 17–18 Meeting 19–20 Partying I guess you could also divide by 2 but that’s kind of annoying to me, and I basically like to treat the D20 as a D10 by looking at the least significant digit. Or as Tamás from  Eldritch Fields  commented (hi!), use D10 instead! I just use nothing but D20 and D6 at my table :)

Jesus Christ. Am I some sort of influencer or thought leader that others both really follow my words and hold me responsible to their idea of them? I got a comment a few days ago while I was out: Why do you care so much about Paul? Religion is wrong and backwards. You are wasting your time. How is it possible to read Settlers and then come crawling back to fucking Christianity? Revolutionary communism is what’s true. Don’t you want to be part of the real movement to abolish the present state of things? Are you going to learn how to overthrow capitalism-imperialism from Paul? Please. First of all, this fucking rules and it genuinely made my day. I agree with Semiurge on one hand that that’s some coelacanth type shit, but it’s so refreshing for someone to call me a proverbial opium addict. I’m grinning ear to ear. Love it! Anyway. I thought since I guess it fucking matters, I would give a general update on where I’m at with things. Didn’t delete the blog. Just had an emotional c...