Traverse Fantasy

Haters will say you can’t 0e-post and 5e-post at the same time. I’ve talked before about the relationship between Outdoor Survival and the original Dungeons & Dragons as written, namely that D&D only says to borrow the other’s game board rather than any of its rules to simulate surviving the wild. This is why I was surprised when my friend Vodka Gobalsky told me that he uses Outdoor Survival more or less wholecloth with OD&D , and considers it as essential as Chainmail to facilitate a cohesive and satisfying game loop. Here’s the problem: Outdoor Survival is kind of insane. Just look that card. Three different tracks for thirst, hunger, and life levels—the latter of which I asked Vodka about, like, “Do you substitute life levels for hit points or a proportion of hit points?” To which he said he didn’t because we both know that doesn’t make sense, but more importantly because hit points are an abstraction of combat. As it were, this makes life levels the hit points...

Vodka Gobalsky / Gin Bradbury gave me a much better idea for a name for FIVEY / FMCNEXT / D&DEEEEE that meets my very strict aesthetic requirements. Going with Cinco now! Anyway, there is an obvious lineage between Cinco and the GLOG insofar as both reduce class features to very simple one-paragraph descriptions, and reduce characters to just a handful of those paragraphs. However, there's problems with each approach that I want to tackle. While playing Cinco and making characters, the amount of feats past 0-level are kind of overwhelming. Sure, you only need to pick up to 4 over the course of the campaign but, the way it was, there's big lists of feats to pick by category with little guidance for how they might interface or synergize. Like if you want a magic or martial feat, you have your choice out of 10 in either basket. That's obscene. The GLOG make this easier by defining character classes as templates of 4 feats. Just pick what class you want to play, an...

I don’t know anything about the Forgotten Realms, but what’s nice is that I don’t even have to. The setting is one big set of plot conveniences to put everyone’s favorite fantasy toys in one box. The D&D movie that came out last year was a fantastic incarnation of the Realms precisely because there was no cohesion except what was necessary to progress the story and (more importantly) make jokes about the world’s own contrivances. This recalls, to a T, Ursula K. Le Guin’s take on commodified fantasy that makes the rounds every now and then (I don't know myself where it's from lol): Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made sa...

I've had three general tendencies lately: (1) desire more freeform role-play that relies more upon fictional positioning than mechanical optimization; (2) play more interesting characters that can't be reduced to their formal attributes; (3) cast aside mechanical hallmarks of D&D to arrive at a game equivalent in terms of its flow (e.g.: FMC Basic is to 0e as Trophy Gold is to an old-school reading of TSR D&D ). These tendencies are already present in FIVEY , which I've been working on because I want to play theater kid D&D without dealing with 5e . There's one apparent contradiction, though: I think that a major selling point of 5e is that its system serves as handrails for freeform play and character conceptualization. It's one thing to have a loosey goosey character concept for which you rely upon fictional positioning to interact with the world and bring out their strengths, but it's another when you can say you have +3 charisma and +2 prof...

After play-testing , I want to combine titles and skills into one category called aspects . The difference between titles and skills was kind of confusing, especially when skills seemed to naturally derive from one's title (at least, their background or origin). Combining the two simplifies the character structure and also opens the door to greater player interpretation. There is already a basis for this in Whitehack , but since skills don't have as much as an impact on the die roll, I'm happy to not attach skills/aspects to specific abilities which feels both arbitrary and punishing. What got me thinking about this even more was two posts: one by If Our Lives Be Short about character backgrounds coding weapon proficiencies , and another by Lich Van Winkle about character backgrounds coding linguistic fluency . Both of these things should be obvious from real life, but we tend to treat them and other things as arbitrarily granted by characters' attributes like their a...

There's one of two ways this will go: either I'm a crackpot, or I'm a captain obvious. Been thinking of two posts: Dwiz on long rests , and Inevitable Gumbo on experience . Dwiz points out that the function of long rests in 5e is not at all to simulate the effects of sleep than it is to pace the game, by way of the consumption and restoration of resources (esp.: hit points and spell slots). He finds that the "gritty realism" variant is better at this than the typical 8-hour rest rule, since it's more likely that the party will deal with approximately 7 encounters between long rests. Gumbo looks at the encounter experience chart for general challenge experience. Not only can you use the guidelines for encounter difficulty to gauge the experience earned from completing a challenge, but you can use that same method to determine experience in hindsight of an encounter. You could combine this understanding with a simplified pip system for tracking experience, unde...

I'm really sick. Stuck inside. Bored. If we assume that an adventuring day is like 8 hours, we can interface between four different hex sizes as requiring different binary fractions of the day. Below, 1 league equals 3 miles or 5 kilometers. Terrain 1 league 2 leagues 4 leagues 8 leagues Regular ⅛ day ¼ day ½ day 1 day Difficult ¼ day ½ day 1 day 2 days The length of an exploration turn would equal the time it would take to traverse one regular hex. This means, regardless of scale, difficult terrain has double the movement cost of regular terrain and always requires two turns to traverse. Hourly time-tracking feels kind of appealing to me lately, for some reason, so I want to try using 1-league ( 3 mile ) hexes sometime. At the same time, I don't want to assume I'll always want to use 1-league hexes. Hence the table.

I ran my homebrew ruleset FIVEY for the first time using the first adventure in the Justice for Neverwinter series, originally (sorta kinda) written for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition . It turned out to be a lot of fun! Though not because of the adventure. Background I feel like I need to explain what this adventure is and justify using it. Justice for Neverwinter is a series of mediocre railroaded adventures that try their very best to model political situations through a gushily rad-lib lens (“peaceful protest!”). The first adventure in the series is about a factional dispute between a mining company (called ForestCo, obviously), its overworked employees, and a tribe of kobolds whose land the company stole to build their mine and company town. The adventurers are sent by ForestCo to deal with the kobold problem by whatever means, but soon they realize the plight of the kobolds and the workers (who are somewhat overeager to work together, even unprompted by the party). Th...

I've had the rules bible for a while, but that's less fun than something I could hypothetically print! They look pretty plain, but maybe that will change. I'm just happy to have the main nitty-gritty rules over one spread. Actually going to run some tonight :)

FIVEY uses brackets to place monsters in one of five categories: mooks, grunts, elites, lieutenants, and bosses. This makes it really easy and quick to come up with a monster and basically speak it into existence! You just need a bracket, a defense class, and some abilities. Monster Brackets Bracket HD GA D/A Mook (M) 1 +1 2 (1d4) Grunt (G) 2 +2 3 (1d6) Elites (E) 4 +3 4 (1d8) Lieutenants (L) 8 +4 5 (1d10) Bosses (B) 16 +5 6 (1d12) Your monster's bracket determines their hit dice (HD), their general ability stat (GA), and their average damage per action (D/A). Hit dice are used to determine or randomize their total hit points: you can roll that many d6s, or just multiply by 4 if you're in a rush. The general ability stat is the monster's base stat for stat checks or contests, which is doubled for tasks at which the monster is considered skilled. Damage per action is basically self-explanatory, especially if you use the example dama...

Originally I wanted a way of rationalizing a 120-day calendar. Speaks for itself, obviously! Human Beings Human beings were originally inter-dimensional colonizers who traveled by starship to conquer distant worlds and thus escape the certain destruction of their home planet. One particular fleet targeted a world system called Fiveria for how it so resembled Terra, except with much shorter orbital cycles and exceptionally quick-growing vegetation. They were met however by a united front of Fiverian peoples, for the first time putting aside their particular differences on a social scale, who swiftly and surely defeated the fleet by means of magic hitherto unknown by human beings. The fleet's underlings were granted refuge on Fiveria, and were eventually fully integrated into the world's increasingly cosmopolitan society. Meanwhile, other fleets of human beings still roam the cosmos, conquering worlds and reshaping them in their own image. Fiverian Calendar The solar cycle of Fi...

I think RuPaul is fucking hilarious, sue me about it. My brain can't resist the punny potential between drag and dragon , especially when villain characters are so often played out to be extremely gay and campy (because gay people are evil, of course!). The more I thought about it, the more I got really into it. So, without further ado. See the FIVEY monster rules if you need help interpreting the stat block! Though it's pretty bog-standard. Roople, Dragon Queen ( Boss ; HD 16, DC 20, GA +5, MV 8/16) A draaagon queeen? I am the QUEEN OF DRAGONS! Now, sashay... away. Roople, about to annihilate a disrespectful bard. Roople is an ancient dragon with prismatic scales and a silver tongue. She finds beauty in things that reflect her image, and her lair is (in her eyes) the most beautiful thing of all. She hoards fine dinnerware and sculptures made of glass, and the very walls of her lair were carved out from the inside of a ginormous amethyst geode. Many people fear Roople fo...

I wrote the basic player-side rules for FIVEY , everything you need to interface with the game! More importantly, this is the foundation upon which character feats are built. Stat Checks Skills & Attunement Titles & Knowledge Special Feats Inspiration Dice Hit Points & Defense How to Play This fantasy adventure game, on a basic level, consists of a conversation between the party of players, each of which controls a character, and the referee who narrates the game-world as the players’ in-game characters experience it. The characters collaborate towards a common goal, and in turn the referee describes how the world reacts or changes. The players will employ their characters’ skills in order to resolve problems imposed by the referee during the adventure. Meanwhile, the referee has all the game-world at their disposal to challenge the characters and their players, by planning mysterious locations or threatening monsters or factional conflicts for the players to enc...

I wanted to memorialize the characters that Sandro and I played during Nova's play-test sessions for Bridewell and Hiss , the summaries for which you can find on her blog . The latter adventure was also just released on itch, so check that out ! I can vouch for how fun and insane they both are. :) Anyway, Sandro's character Ferdrek perished while dealing a killing blow to a snake god . It was an utterly fantastic moment that none of us anticipated, precisely the kind of thing for which we play elfgames. That doesn't mean I can't miss him, though! So, here's my attempts at recreating Sandro's Ferdrek and my Ursaline using my homebrew heartbreaker FIVEY . Ferdrek Ferdrek has the 'disinherited noble' background and the 'champion' occupation. Using Nova's D&D -flavored house rules for Trophy , he was also of the fighter-equivalent class. In the context of Bridewell , we decided that he was the last heir of a family that once ruled somewhere ...

I shared this on Twitter and Bluesky earlier, but wanted to blog about it and also retype the Q&A section so it can be used outside the sheet itself! Below is a "pregame survey" that I wrote for my homebrew heartbreaker FIVEY , which asks participants questions in order to help the table align on expectations for the game and how to play it. This is because I play D&D with people who have a wide variety of play styles or come from different game cultures, and I want to accommodate those different crowds. One question I asked myself while working on this was: why accommodate instead of specializing? Is it possible for one ruleset to please everyone? Or does a general ruleset please anyone? My answer is that D&D , as a cultural "practice", mostly comes down to a certain aesthetic and formal ruleset. The specific way in which people "use" D&D varies wildly, and even one particular version of D&D can be employed to different ends. Think ...

I thought it would be fun to take two of my old D&D characters from high school and turn them into FIVEY characters! Actually, not just that: they're my first two characters ever, dating to 2017/2018. Let's see what happens! Chad, Human Fighter Chad was born into a merchant family and went to college for business, but all he learned was how to fight, how to party, and how to pick up chicks and twinks despite his average bod and mediocre personality. “If my big sword won’t impress you, my personality probably won’t either.” He also has a pet chihuahua named Sadie whom he takes with him everywhere he goes in a baby carrier. The illustration above was by my partner! Of course, we both imagined him to look like Lucky Luciano. I played Chad up to level 6, though I think I started him at level 5. D&D Features & Traits Chad’s top three abilities are strength, constitution, dexterity, and charisma—for some reason, these are all 18 and 20, so I think we must have rando...