Traverse Fantasy

You can quit playing your pretend games wholesale and go back to living an undisturbed life not worrying about what a lyric game is or whether indie creators are more or less oppressed than Minecraft youtubers. However, I myself began following TTRPG hobbyists on Twitter because I liked being part of the discussion and learning how to have more fun with my friends. I had even been lurking for years earlier, reading blogs and threads and archived G+ posts. By the time I decided to join the conversation, the predominant mode of interacting with everyone else was selling PDFs on the internet. It took me a while to realize that none of that was necessary or desirable for myself. It took me until more recently to realize I didn’t have to put up with others doing it either. I want an exit from what has been sold to me and others as normal. Something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-com...

Edit: I removed the photos from this post because they are too large and slowing down the blog for everyone. Apologies on all accounts! I had the pleasure of playing Wanderhome under the guidance of Jay Dragon, the author of the book. Wanderhome was influenced by Dragon's experiences as a camp counselor, especially in running LARPs for campers and helping them feel comfortable playing with others. Play itself is an essentially human thing. Huizinga argues in Homo Ludens that play is in fact constitutive of being human, in that play is the rehearsal of cultural or symbolic expectations. Play then is the basis of socialization, since when we adorn ourselves with titles like “mother” or “father” or “cop” or “robber”, we are indeed playing a role that has been taught to us. Yet Dragon has found that as we get older, we become shameful towards play. We refuse to put on new masks. Maybe, and this is just my hunch, the passage into adulthood consists of internalizing particular roles t...

After months of writing and rewriting and analyzing and formatting, the body text of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , my retroclone of the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons (a.k.a. OD&D or 0E ) is basically complete! I wanted to take this time to talk about my motivation in working on this, how far it's come along, and what steps are left for me to feel satisfied in putting at least an initial version online.

In most campaigns I've played, the passage of time on a larger scale is handled liberally. We tend to see the value in handling smaller scale time via procedure, thinking of exploration in terms of 10 minute chunks for no reason other than to structure the game around those chunks like clockwork (torch duration, monster checks, etc.). The course of the year is not given the same attention, for the obvious reason that it's difficult to keep track of. At first glance, you'd think you'd have to figure out what day of the month it is, how many days are in each specific month, when one month stops and another ends. However, using a simplified calendar like the one I will outline below, you can begin to see months pass and the seasons turn without much additional effort. The point of this calendar is not to simulate any actual calendar we use in the real world. Real world calendars have the dual function of organizing human life and matching that with what are basically measu...

Some notes before I just copy and paste this whole thing: I'm using a pound/shilling/penny coin denomination, with a ratio of 1L : 20s : 240d. I opt for 2 mile hexes because I think that's fun. I assume a very simple calendar with 12 months of 4 weeks each. There's no good reason for this post; it's 3 AM and I was bored after finals, so I treated myself to one big stupid math problem. Is there a reasonable way to simulate a fantasy economy sorta transitioning from feudalism to capitalism? No, not really. At best, you can use this to make sorta informed economic decisions about the game-world. Run into a hex? Roll 1-6 to see how many villages of people are on there. Want to make them pay you taxes? You get 2L from every village. Want to hire people? It costs 1L to hire 1 person for a year. Want to know how productive agriculture should be to be viable as an industry? (I hope) I got you. Agriculture & Population A good farmer does not put all their eggs in one basket ...

This is a record of a rule we improvised while playing You Awaken in a Strange Place  [1] by Jacob Andrews of Drawfee fame. If your character finds themselves stricken with a perhaps all-too-natural attraction to an anthropomorphic furry/scaly/feathery person, make a furry saving throw. Initially, you have a score of 12 against furry attraction. You must roll less than or equal to this score on two dice; however, each attempt (i.e. each encounter with a desire you resist to fulfill) also reduces your score by one. If you fail the save, you will no longer resist whatever your desire leads you to. If you were trying to resist giving into a date proposal, for example, now you cannot resist saying yes. You can spend a turn trying to “pray the furry away”, and thereby restore your score by one pip. Other Applications Obviously, this can apply to other situations besides resisting attraction towards furry folk. Why not have like different scores for each of the seven deadly sins, or...

These are some scattered notes on hexcrawls, to brainstorm some fun ideas for places of interest and to reflect on my past experiences with hexcrawl rules. There's no order to this; just some thoughts and research. Hex Prompts I don't know. A lupus (i.e. werewolf) colony is due for a contractual delivery of wooden furniture from a carpentry guild on the other side of the forest. You need to get your hands on enough money to pay your taxes to the baron or skip over to another territory. A local dairy farmer family claims that there's a legendary dragon abducting their cattle and depositing them in a mountain. A giant axolotl competes with anglers for the fish that live in the local lake, and it's only getting bigger the more it eats. Families of deceased miners seek the remains of their loved ones in an abandoned Byetkoin mine suddenly infested with psionic worms. A territorial dispute has erupted between two baronies who are mutually excluded from each other's non-a...