Traverse Fantasy

I got new rules, I count 'em. I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition , but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but the team at MCDM are such maximalist rules writers that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched my queen  Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down the structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel ’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not t...

I’ve mentioned in passing my haven rules for my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! but never took the time to describe it in much detail. Remember that I don’t really fuck with wealth; instead, each item of treasure just has the value of “1 treasure”, and you spend that during downtime to do an activity ( this is outdated, but you get the idea ). One of those activities is havencraft where you invest 1 treasure to build a town and populate with your favorite NPCs you’ve met and recruited throughout the game. These are called lackeys. Cost Type Population Ability Lackeys 2 Hamlet 100 +1 1 6 Village 900 +2 2 12 Town 3,600 +4 3 20 City 10,000 +8 4 Each season (generally speaking, or unless I fuck it up, a play-session), lackeys can either do a downtime activity on behalf of the governor or embark on an adventure. In the latter case, they can either accompany the crew on their own adventure and basically act like a back-up character, or they can be sent...

I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc —isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the se...

The vocabularies of certain Indo-European languages encode a memory of a social taboo against speaking the name of the bear. Germanic languages famously (although not quite accurately) are thought to refer to the bear as “the brown one”. Slavic languages seem to use a term derived from the phrase “honey-eater”. Baltic languages call them “hairy ones”. D&D retroclones operate on a similar principle. They avoided speaking the name of the devil (that is, whichever particular D&D edition is being emulated) for license reasons, but signal euphemistically to the reader which edition is being lifted. Old School Essentials in one printing refers to itself as being “styled after the beloved games of the 1970s and 1980s” but it’s very specifically a retroclone of the 1981 D&D Basic/Expert rules. My own Fantastic Medieval Campaigns is “a new version of the ruleset for fantasy wargaming campaigns, first published in 1974”—but “the” ruleset in question is the original 1974 D&D...

Feats are a big hit, turns out! I’m bringing back level 0 ancestry feats because I can tell my friends just wanted more to play with. “I don’t like complexity” mfs when they get to build their little guy. Some of these I had basically written years ago! Changling: Once per day, change the appearance of your face. Dwarf: You are immune to alcohol and poison, and can detect both. Elf: You are fully aware while you sleep; nothing surprises you. Hellchild: You have advantage at intimidating and seducing others. Hoblin: You can hide in bush or shadow, and behind bigger folk. Orc: Once daily at 0 hearts, restore 1 and attack with advantage. Nymph:  Spend 1 inspiration to call forth local nymphs of your type. Scalespawn: Spend 1 action to breathe fire for 1 dmg. Treat as arcana. Terran: Never suffer disadvantage from linguistic differences. Watcher: When you rest and heal, you also see visions of elsewhere. I’m also reworking “experience feats” (the ones you get at ...

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...

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 :)

I wanted to have a pseudo-lifepath thing in the appendices for Cinco! to help players conceptualize characters if they’re at a loss with where to get started. Below is what came of that! You’ll recognize a lot of material from my original draft, FIVEY , but I tried to condense everything into providing just enough information to contextualize a character origin without pigeon-holing individual characters. Thanks to Alex from To Distant Lands for providing really helpful feedback on that front! Without further ado… If you’re playing a character, pick or roll on the table below for your character’s origin; keep in mind, though, that the Game Mother might disallow certain origins just to make the setting more cohesive. If you’re the Game Mother, considering building your setting around the characters your players create; otherwise be upfront with expectations and don’t surprise your players with them! A setting handout helps everyone. Changeling (1–2): A fairy snatched a baby to pay...

I’ve been making changes to my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! based on my most recent play-sessions. These aren’t published yet because I have some new empty space I’d like to fill with handy tools for myself. The document is now A4 so that it can be resized to A5 for print. The main character sheet is now digest/A5 sized, and cards for items and exhaustion will be moved from your sheet to your hand. Replaced supply with rations. Rations are only spent when resting for a whole night, specifically to treat any place in the wilderness like a haven. Health potions however can be consumed at any point, including during an encounter; this makes them very valuable as treasure! Removed distinction between equipped and packed cards. You can now use any of your 7-ish items during combat, except that: large items cost 1 extra action to use; and you can’t use duplicates of the same armor type. Levels are now from 1 to 10. When you play with feats, you start with one at level 1 and gain...

Back from wherever I was! First, I’d like to call attention and give thanks to those of you who have submitted projects to the Icon0clasm Ball  (extended to end of the year for my sake!): Songs for Polymede ( Oleander Garden ): I was fully gagged when I saw this project submitted. It’s freak shit in the most delightful way: a module whose setting is encoded through fictional myths in poetry and prose, combined with new rules for manufacture and trade, and a possible elaboration of 0E ’s combat rules. Transsexual body politics meets Capital-as-god meets neko goblins. This is a really fascinating setting which I’d love to explore someday, and the way in which it transforms (or, as Oleander puts it, tortures) OD&D reflects the material culture of the original work, being in line with the form factor of the 1975 supplements. The Hidden Chains of Command ( Anteater ): This is a really fascinating critique of FMC as a facsimile of Chainmail and OD&D . Specifically, t...

My partner got me and herself really into  Dandadan , which she described at one point as  Mob Psycho  for people who go to the club. It's so so so fucking good. Momo and her friends are my queens. Okarun is such a precious squishy boywife . The stories of the monsters they encounter and how others get wrapped into their life pull you by your heartstrings to the edge of your couch. Anyway, I was reminded that the most popular RPG in Japan is Call of Cthulhu , and it struck me how Dandadan is a perfect potential reimagining of that premise: just replace grimy 1940’s investigators with bitchy modern teenagers. Since I tend to center my home game on mysteries anyway, this led me to think about how I would lean further into it and support Dandadan -style supernatural hijinks in the same way that D&D supports sailor guardians and Fortnite supports Sabrina Carpenter. I think there's two main considerations: possessed characters and psychic characters. Both of these can b...

There's a really good post by Elmcat about prepping settlement-based adventures by designing neighborhood blocks and representing buildings (etc.) as people! But it also has a petty desire table that I felt like would be nice to generalize: that although people's relationships are often overdetermined by their relative positions in a social matrix (in TTRPG terms, we can refer to these as factional allegiances), it's interesting when a socially determined relationship is complicated by a personal one, whether mutual or one-sided. To that end, I came up with a D20 table similar to Elmcat's, with just 10 results; the idea is that results [11–20] are straightforward and fully overdetermined, whereas [1–10] are complicated: D20 Relation 1 Aspiration: X wants to be Y 2 Competition: X wants to outdo Y 3 Fear: X personally fears Y 4 Grudge: X feels Y wronged them 5 Hatred: X outright doesn’t like Y 6 Infatuation: X desires after Y 7 Je...

Following Lich Van Winkle's post about dee-five-six , I wanted to post about a realization I had that I'm sure others know but thought would be nice to record: 2D6+X where we take the sum PbtA-style approximates (X+1)D6 where we take the highest roll. Below is a table of result brackets: Result Sum of 2D6+X Highest of (X+1)D6 < …6 1–3 = 7–9 4–5 > 10… 6 Below is a table of results with increasing X ∊ [0, 3] for 2D6+X: 2D6+X < = > 2D6 41.7% 41.7% 16.7% 2D6+1 27.8% 44.4% 27.8% 2D6+2 16.7% 41.7% 41.7% 2D6+3 8.33% 33.3% 58.3% Below is a table of results with increasing X ∊ [0, 3] for (X+1)D6: (X+1)D6 < = > 1D6 50.0% 33.3% 16.7% 2D6 25.0% 44.4% 30.6% 3D6 12.5% 45.4% 42.1% 4D6 6.26% 41.9% 51.8% I think this is where we get the BitD and Trophy variations on the original PbtA roll, and I prefer that version because the results feel less obscure? Or just on the basis ...

Put some thoughts on a Discord server: was actually going to sleep last night thinking about whether it’s dissonant to have racism/nationalism but not sexism in my home campaign but along similar lines i feel like sexism generally requires women to be relegated to a private sphere that makes them less prevalent in the world (even if the PCs are exceptional) unless the campaign is specifically about sex and that public/private division I don’t know. Maybe I need to self-criticize about this. It’s like I subvert race and sex in D&D orthogonally: I handle race in a realist way which problematicizes the way it’s taken for granted and used as a short-hand for moral nature in fantasy, usually flipping the monster lens onto “races” usually considered good or normal (while emphasizing the symbolic or social basis of that lens); whereas I handle sex by eliminating patriarchy and placing women in socially prominent roles, whether ‘good’ (world-protagonistic) or ‘bad’ (world-antagonistic...

This is partly my attempt to modularize more complex rules from Cinco! (I can’t decide how to type that) as opt-in rules for characters, as well as coming up with additional ones because they’d make more sense as special abilities than as general (if complex) rules. The following subsystems would be impacted and restricted only to characters with the appropriate feats: Critical attack moves Travel options Arcane enhancements Healing at havens This isn’t my first time doing this, but I was never fully happy with my initial two attempts (wow, one year apart, in 2023 and 2024 ). I feel happier with these because they feel more potentially abstract and reskinnable based on who your character is. My plan is to have 20 "experience feats" that you gain from your levels, and 20 "origin feats" which I've written before and I would actually be really happy to play with. So, these are the 20 experience feats! As a treat, here's the optional "unified...