Traverse Fantasy

This is something I wanted to isolate from my post about mosaic worlds [1] because I thought it was worth drawing out and expanding upon. In that post, I talk about organizing the world into modules of four hexes. Although it's built on the assumption that each hex takes a baseline of 4 hours to traverse, I discuss an upper level of abstraction where you instead traverse a whole funny-shaped region in 1 day. This recalls the original hex crawl procedure from OD&D , where a turn is considered as having the duration as one day. The difference is that instead of moving through multiple hexes in one day-turn, you move through one region in one (at a minimum) day. This has the benefit of simplifying the choices you make while making your decisions more meaningful since you can emphasize the various features of the whole region, at least along the vector of travel. It also massively simplifies the resource management problem, i.e. ration consumption. For hex crawl procedures with ti...

Since making my Classic Traveller world generator ( link ), I've also made a world generator for Chris P.'s Night Tripper . Come check it out! (Click here)

This weekend, I made a Classic Traveller world generator to practice programming websites (since I don't know very much HTML, CSS, or JavaScript). The project was inspired by my friend Emmy Verte's recent modernization of the original procedure in Book 03 ( link ). Hope you enjoy it! Click here! Below is a generated description of a random world. The main page also includes four tables for the world's starport, geography, society, and technology World E67B899-4 This world is a dwarf planet with a volume 2% that of Earth. There is a C-class starport here, of routine quality. The atmosphere is thin, so you do not need to equip anything to breathe while offboard. Its surface is totally devoid of water. Hundreds of people live here. They have no rulers, but maintain a libertarian attitude among themselves. They have attained an interplanetary level of technology.

  Note: I started writing this in March 2022. I procrastinated. This post was originally inspired by one of my experimental (and defunct!) pamphlets Blockcrawl , where the referee generates a random world using Tetris -style permutations of blocks. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be difficult to switch to using hexes instead of squares. Moreover, with just four hexes in a single area, it wouldn't be difficult to make interesting areas with specific features in advance of a game, rather than vague areas defined only by their biomes. These areas could then be reused and slotted into any world, being small and self-contained modules for adventuring. World Mosaics A single module is made up of four hexes that can be arranged in four different ways, as shown below. There are four hexes per module precisely because they can be arranged in more ways than just three hexes, within an area of seven hexes. There are even more combinations of four hexes in this space than there wou...

We were chatting on Discord about resurrection across different editions of D&D . I said that instead of there being any major consequences in Fourth Edition , you should just be able to respawn like in a typical MMO. My friend Ty of mindstorm ( link ) said, “4e should just be sprinkling residuum on the body like salt bae.” It’s a really fun idea that, if you’re in the middle of a fight and you die, your cleric friend just needs to head right over and sprinkle green cocaine or whatever on your body. Maybe then you resurrect in the next round? Anyway, then my friend Ava of Permanent Cranial Damage ( link ) said “I feel like resurrection is one of those things where if u want it in your game tie it meaningfully to the core loop.” So, here’s my attempt to make resurrection a central feature of the clerical class or equivalent because it'd be fun. Clerics don’t need spell books. They need water, and they need to carry it inside silly little jars in their backpack (probably also s...

I think that blogs are great for facilitating discourse [1]. However, when it comes to practical functionality at the table or even on a video call, it can be difficult to rely upon and refer to blog posts during a game. Even many PDFs available online are not accessible for printing. Whether for your own reference or as handouts for your friends, or also to distribute online, why not make physical printouts? In this blog post, I'm going to go over different forms such printouts can take, and what benefits and drawbacks each form has. I will assume that you access to a regular printer which can only handle standard (letter or A4) sized sheets of paper. Besides those sizes, I will list a 'compromise' size which can be printed onto either size, in case you want to distribute materials between people who use differently sized sheets. I'm not a professional, but I think it's fun to make these little things and they prove useful. taking photos of various things i’ve pr...

Combat is a key concern of playing a D&D because that's part of what we expect the game to entail. It's whatever. I do feel like if you're focusing on a lethal sneaking-around game, you don't need anything complicated because the point is that if you're put yourself at risk of death then you're likely already screwed. Like, just make that a save-versus-being-impaled-by-a-pointy-stick (not really my preference). Nevertheless, there's something to be said for ensuring some continuity with D&D combat rules to be able to plug in monsters et cetera without much issue. Plenty of people also just like combat, so, you know. It doesn't take much to make everyone happy, especially when people tend to be familiar with whittling hit points as the predominant way of killing each other. Let's talk about it. Weapons and Armor in D&D I have written so, so much about mathematical differences between many variations of the typical D&D sch...

Good morning! I've taken the list of blog posts from my post last week, "The OSR Should Die" [1], and expanded it to include posts from 2006 to 2021. I've explained my rationale on the new page. Please enjoy! Click here, or click 'Keystones' on the top of my blog. It's definitely not the only list of its kind, but I hope it being annotated and relatively extensive will help put all of them in perspective of each other. My focus is on the emergence of OSR play style 'wisdom' which is held basically common at this point: improvised rulings, player skill, non-superheroics, and a lack of game balance. Early on, a DIY culture was built around this play style. At first it was to create new materials for unsupported editions of D&D ; then, it was to create rulebooks to emulate those editions; then, it was altogether new rulesets and adventures grounded in the same play style, but not recreating those old D&D editions nor retaining Gygax's fan...

Please read the original post (link!) if you haven't! I also updated the conclusion a couple hours after I published it, so you might want to read that to better understand my own view of things if you caught the post right out of the gates. Here it is, copied-and-pasted, because I want to focus on it. Each proclamation of the OSR’s death relies upon a particular definition of the OSR. When the OSR “died” in 2012, it was because the community had attained the level of success it had always strove for; the old school was finally revived. When the OSR “died” in 2019, it was because a significant platform was deleted from the internet, and because of abuses which had rocked the community to its core. Yet it was only a death to those who looked at the ruin afterward and saw all that had been forgotten since, with no one to restore it to yet some other dubious past state; at the same time, most of the people who were there were just dispersed elsewhere, still doing their own t...

Click Here for 'Basic Edition' Is the OSR dead yet? If you asked a couple of my friends, they would say yes: there was a body of cultural knowledge which has been rendered inaccessible (for some reason) to hobbyists who are working in the same space. What is old is new again, so now people are talking about random encounters and reaction rolls as if they had discovered them themselves like Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas. Obviously, they weren’t the first ones there and, if you were to ask my friend Ramanan Sivaranjan from the Save Vs. Total Party Kill blog, no one had left either. The OSR is not dead because he’s still there, and he still keeps up with people from the time of G+ who are also all still doing their own thing if only somewhere else. How can something be dead and alive at the same time? It could be a difference of definitions. It could also be a zombie. An authoritative definition of the OSR is difficult to arrive at because any one definition is s...