Traverse Fantasy

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...

Knave  by Ben Milton was my first light-weight old-school D&D sort of game that I ran for my friends. I suggested using it because although some of them were familiar with Fifth Edition , many of them just weren’t. I could tell that they would be overwhelmed with the rules of character creation and of the game itself. I also wanted to run our little campaign more like a party game where they could just get onto the Zoom call, generate their characters, and start playing. This casual approach lends itself more to an “old school” style of game, which at that time I had been interested in playing for a while. For me, Fifth Edition didn’t just have baggage with respect to its huge amount of rules, but also with how it was expected to be played. The play culture expects you to create a whole character with a background and a motivation, and then the dungeon master creates a story with which to challenge the characters enough to show their respective strengths and advance their cha...

I played Valiant Quest [1] with some friends this weekend and it was a blast! We all had a great time constantly tripping and falling over ourselves and getting pushed around by rude goblins. Some of us, myself included, came away from the experience immediately wanting to take bits and pieces from it into something that aligns more with our own preferences in role-playing games. That being said, here's what I took from the whole experience combined with my time playing the board game Pandemic  which also relies on a core spend-X-points-per-turn loop. At least one of my friends is also working on something along similar lines (i.e. inspired by playing VQ ), so you can look forward to that too.

In this post, I'm going to offer one view on the difference between abilities and skills as they are often defined in tabletop role-playing games. This is informed by previous posts I've made on the difference between open and closed systems of interactions, and the difference between kinetic and potential abilities. This isn't going to be very long, and it's just for my own reference (and to get some thoughts down).

"What is a lyric game?" Wouldn't we all like to know! There might not be much use in trying to define something that, for many, is best left undefined. In their recent article for Dicebreaker  [1], Linda H. Codega offers the following heuristic for how to determine if a work might be considered a lyric game: While the genre often defies definition, typically lyric games embody one or more of the following aspects: a removal of the distance between the ‘player’ and the ‘character’, the gamification of everyday experiences, and the reversal of assumptions to impact play . “Lyric games” as a term was coined by John R. Harness in late 2019 but, as it was a definition meant to encompass an emergent genre, many games published before 2019 are now considered lyric. Many lyric games are sold and distributed with anti-capitalist and community-forward priorities - often there will be community copies (copies donated by the author for those experiencing marginalisation or hardship...