Traverse Fantasy

Dear Reddit: am I the asshole? I jumped into a conversation on the OSR discord about how people often write TTRPG adventures (or texts more broadly, I think) with such a utilitarian mindset geared towards play that they often neglect to write anything actually interesting or pleasurable to read—you know how often the pendulum swings one way or the other. This inspired something in me, so I was like “Yeah!!! And isn’t that the fun part anyway?” Some people agreed, but for the most part it was like that reaction picture of girls staring at you because you said something weird at a party, but instead of girls it’s a bunch of sweaty guys because I forgor what server I was in (no offense— the OSR will be the OSR ). I thought it was a bit and then I kept posting Lacan’s sexuation table as if to point fingers and be like “MALE!” (boom) “PHALLIC!” (boom) “CASTRATED!” (boom) Oh God. I am the asshole. Shit. Fuck. Damnit. But I thought it was interesting when I DM’d someone about it and was lik...

The story continues—sort of! More-or-less new characters across the board, but we’re moving on with the thing because I had already prepped this shit and didn’t want to do another fucking thing. Unfortunate as it was to recount events up until then to provide some semblance of context, it also felt like a good exercise that solidified my approach to this campaign: fuck time records. Redo sessions. Retcon whoever was there up until the one about to start. Individual characters may follow their own arcs, but the basic unit of the campaign is the crew and whoever’s in the crew can change as needed. I think that’ll keep me from going insane more than imposing bullshit like “You have to go home at the end of an adventure” or “You need to schedule for everyone last time to come back” or “Someone needs to substitue for so-and-so to play their character.” Anyway. Characters! My stuff is put away so I don’t have their names on me, but a rose smells sweet even if you don’t know what it’s called....

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...