Legendary Lives

Last year, at the suggestion of a friend, I hunted up a copy of the RPG Legendary Lives (Second Edition, 1993) by Joe Williams and Kathleen Williams. Published by Marquee Press, which I believe was the Williams' imprint.

This is a hell of a book. I mean... it's of a time. It's a wonderful example of desktop publishing and early 90s RPG design. It has many, many flaws. It has difficult material that, for that time, felt perfectly OK... just fantasy stuff. But in 2026 having a "gypsy" as a race template is quite problematic at best. But all that being said, it's a hell of a book and I'd like to talk about it a little.

"In Legendary Lives™, you'll play a hero in a fantastic realm of epic adventure." says the back cover. It boasts 26 races, an open-ended magic system, and emphasis on fast action and storytelling. It also boasts that it is the first game to have player-facing dice rolls. But they don't call it that, they call it "semi-diceless", meaning that the GM doesn't roll anything. An innovation, it seems. I'm unaware of earlier games that had this baked into the rules.

For characters, you pick a race, generate or assign stats to a healthy list of attributes, make adjustments, pick skills, and roll 1d20 to resolve tasks. Pretty standard stuff for RPG design of the time.

You have a bunch of races like nethermen, foresters, witches, and hillfolk. The term "race" is used loosely here, which I think is kinda nice. Who ever heard of the "race of foresters"? But I think maybe each race is linked to a region of the world, which means race encompasses culture. If this was made in 2026, they might go with heritage instead, which would be a better fit.

There are also a bunch of character types, such as shaman, sorcerer, bard, knight, etc. So you end up with a netherman sorcerer or a nomad spy. 

The magic is nice. There's a list of 16 or so spells that, like Ars Magica, are very broad in application. If you have the Illusion spell, then you can make all sorts of illusions. You describe what you want to accomplish and the referee (they use that dreadful term... oh well, I can just change it to Legendeer) decides how much it would cost. If that cost is more than your current spell points, you can't do it. Spell points are equal to your skill level with the spell. 

The book has a chunky section about religions and cults. A hell of a lot more than you would expect, which is pretty awesome. This kind of stuff is spread out through the game from the races, types, magic, and the setting material itself. So the world is baked right in, but not heavily. It's a game you could play in a generic world or some other setting, with a little trivial effort.

Unfortunately it doesn't appear that the game is available for purchase or download anymore. I got my copy via eBay. But here's the official website and it has links to a bunch of adventures and resources for the game. I think there was a lot of love for it, at least for a time, and at least among a small cadre of gamers.  

Artists I Like: Bryan Baugh

I've spoken about my love for Bryan Baugh's work before in this post. But he needs to be officially immortalized in my Artists I Like series.

Baugh hits the dark, campy, Halloween horror vibe like a champion. His Wulf and Batsy comic is delicious. But I already said this in my other post from 2023. But some of the links in that post are now dead, so here's where you should go to find his work: Instagram and Bryan Baugh's Monster Art and Comics.

Dead Wizards Design Log 03

Almost all my game designs include some form of "meta currency". Luck points. I got the idea originally from the TSR AD&D adventure module CB1: Conan Unchained. In that module, David "Zeb" Cook gives us a cool luck mechanic invented for the adventure to help mitigate the disparate outcomes of a typical AD&D game vs. what you see on the big screen (the module cover is literally a photo of Arnold in the Conan movie). In other words, Conan does amazing feats that are difficult to simulate if you're just playing the game straight.

Cook's idea was simple. Each PC has a set number of Luck Points that only the DM knows. You as a player have no idea who many points you have. Here's a screenshot of the text. 

I actually adore this. I've tried to use it a couple of times in one-shots with mixed results. Players need to embrace the idea and you gotta remind them to use it or they just keep playing normally.

Anyway, for Dead Wizards, there is Sand. Sand is the meta currency. Players know how much they have and they can spend it to auto-succeed in tasks or to take over narrative control of the game for a very short time (kinda like The Pool).

The auto-succeed is called a Sand Storm. The idea is the Judge rolls a secret d6 to see how many actions you can get away with. You start describing your actions. You stop when you feel like it, but once you exceed the number of actions rolled by the Judge... you're run out of luck. If you exceed it, your excess action not only fails but it fails in a terrible way. So it's a gamble.

Dead Wizards Design Log 02

Last post was about Cunning and Prowess, which are the stats PCs roll against to accomplish almost everything. But that's not the first part of character creation.

First, you come up with two Marks, or "specials". There's a list of 20 fleshed-out examples to build from. Here are a few to give you an idea what I'm talking about.

"2. You have a silver flute that was given to you “for luck” by an old woman on her deathbed. Playing it clears your mind and lets you focus. Sometimes playing the flute allows you to see solutions to problems or divine facts you could not otherwise have known."

"17. A vicious vulture plucked out one of your eyes. You know its name and nature. A desert devil, it is. A supernatural monster with part of your soul inside it. When you close your good eye and concentrate, you can see through the evil old vulture’s eyes. You can often make it fly where you like so you can see distant places. One day it may find you and try to finish the job."

Marks don't include game mechanics. The way they work is to be sorted out between player and Judge, but usually comes down a modifier to an Action Roll (Prowess or Cunning) or an Oracle (1d6)... the two mechanics used in the game.

I'm trying to keep this focused on the setting's theme, on characters, and the stuff that develops naturally through play. The mechanics underpin it, but I wouldn't call this a crunchy or fiddly system at all. 

Dead Wizards Design Log 01

Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery RPG set in a sandy land. A bit of sand and sorcery, if you will.

The idea came up about ten years ago as an OD&D hack inspired by Corben, Howard, and Tanith Lee. Revamped it later and it changed into something completely different, becoming GOZR.

But now I'm back to the original concept. I started with GOZR mechanics as a base and I've been working from there. I stripped a few things away, added other things.

I'll try to do this as a series of posts over time, just talking about one aspect of the game or another. If you read this, feedback is greatly appreciated.

First up, the core character "stats": Prowess and Cunning. Prowess for all things physical and Cunning for everything else. Why just these two? Because in all the sword and sorcery tales I enjoy, characters deal with their world through only these two modes. I don't think any more are needed.

You roll for your stats. But like GOZR, lower is better because the stat is the target number to meet or beat on a 1d20 roll.

The roll to set the stat is 1d4+2 for each, so you can only get 3-6. A very narrow range, which is extremely on purpose and I spent a lot of time thinking about it, running simulations, and all that. It means the guy who gets a 3 and the guy who gets a 6 are still fully compatible in terms of skill.

The rolled target number is for a Basic level of difficulty. Then each level higher adds 3 to that target number. The difficulties are Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic.

So if your Basic Prowess is 5, then you'd have a spread like this:

Basic 5
Arduous 8
Grueling 11
Epic 14

As with GOZR, this simply means you look at your sheet to see what your target number is. Quick and dirty. But here the Judge has options for increasing difficulty. The Judge can decide case-by-case how difficult a task is.

Bonuses to rolls are low. In most cases, you're not getting one. But you can get a +1 for some things and maybe even +2. That makes those target numbers more challenging, but not daunting. You are playing heroic, capable sword and sorcery characters... not farmers and zeroes.

Once your target numbers are set, they do not easily change. There's a way you can swap points between adventures, making Prowess 1 better and Cunning 1 worse, for example. But 3 is the hard limit. Nobody has a stat target lower than 3.

Characters are more differentiated by their histories and their special traits. More on that later. 

Setting Survey 2

Continuing from this thread, here's a few more random RPG pulls and my off-the-cuff thoughts on how they handle setting.

The Black Sword Hack by Kobayashi is a sword and sorcery RPG based on David Black's The Black Hack and is essentially Elric the RPG. It's fantastic. The majestic art of Goran Gligović makes the book shine.

Anyway... setting. In this book, the setting is strongly implied by the tone and themes with the names of locations and kingdoms scattered in random tables, such as a list of languages. There is no default map or specific setting details. Instead, you invent the setting as a group, using the setting elements of the game. For example, there's a "dusty, crumbling empire" called Askavian and a little set of events that could happen in relation to it. But that's about it. The rest is up to you.

The book includes a nice little example setting by Evlyn Moreau.

It's a good approach. If I remember correctly, Orkworld did a similar thing. In that game there is a map without names and you put the various setting locations wherever you want. Either way, these approaches are a hybrid between a written setting and tools for creating your own setting.

Heavy Metal Thunder Mouse by Derek A. Kamal with illustrations by Jacob Hunt is a game about mice and rats in motorcycle clubs. I think this is a FATE-based game and is explicitly called a storytelling game by the author. The way it handles setting is very simple: the game is set in Thunder City, a fictional city on the west coast (of the USA, I think). It's a commerce town, a young town, a place to seek your fortune. The first page of the game is a little map of Thunder City.

So that's a pretty straightforward way of handling setting. But since this is a storytelling game, they aren't overly concerned with laying out every street and dive bar. It's pretty open ended, I think. There's a lot of descriptions of motorcycle gangs, clubhouses, and so forth. Fun.

 

Setting Survey 1

It's hard to write a good setting. I'm working on Dead Wizards and when I hit a struggle point, I like to grab books off my shelf and take a peek at how other people handle setting.

Random pulls...

Fever Swamp by Luke Gearing and Melsonian Arts Council is a thin little hardback that reminds me of a kid's book in how it feels to hold. I remember assuming this was a Troika! book since it was Melsonian, but no... this is OSR. And nowhere in the book does it ever explain what it is. There's no "use this with x game" statement. No... the inside covers are tables and the book just kicks off and never stops until it runs out of pages.

Only because I know OSR shit and I know D&D do I know this is that kind of book. I see little short stat lines for monsters with AC, HD, ATK, etc. There are two new character classes and their HD, XP, and saves are based on other classes. They mention Specialist as one. The game this is probably originally written for is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which has the Specialist instead of the Thief.

Anyway, the setting is presented in little bursts and in tables and hex descriptions. It is a hex crawl kind of thing. There are not walls of text explaining the history of the region. Little bit here, little bit there, mostly delivered through tables and hex descriptions.

Takeaway: Getting straight to the meat of it is pretty nice. 

Yoon-Suin by Noisms is a table-heavy setting. Most of the setting is implied through copious amounts of writing written from the perspectives of people in the world. And the rest is mostly random tables. But it's a lot. The book kicks off with The Journal of Laxmi Guptra Dahl, a 28 page affair written in first person as the author explored the region. Now... I'm not a fan of prose-heavy RPG books. The reason I haven't knocked myself out trying to collect all the D&D Gazetteer series is because they're just too god damn heavy handed on the writing (we went from the minimalist X1 setting info to the maximalist Gaz series!).

But Yoon-Suin is very special. I'll happily take notes from how it is arranged. Mainly the way it uses random tables to do most of the work... an approach I took with GOZR.

Takeaway: Random tables build setting more evocatively than descriptions, in my opinion.

Anomalous Subsurface Environment ASEI by Patrick Wetmore is a self-described "gonzo" adventure location set in a kind of future post-apocalypse with all the trappings of Mad Max meets Waterdeep. This sucker is at once weird and sci-fantasy and also OSR as all hell. It's set up and presented in the classic way that old TSR modules were done. You get an overview to explain what it is, then he just goes straight into a X1 Isle of Dread style Gazetteer-lite, 40 page setting description. It's a beefy but compact read. This is a whole ass setting laid out just so you can have a place for PCs to be before they go down into the megadungeon.

Takeaway: You can just tackle the setting bit by bit, with short descriptions of what is needed and whatever history is necessary. You don't have to avoid all that shit if you don't want to.

Yeah... so what have I learned tonight? That I have a lot of game books written for old school D&D type games.

Also, just do it. Dead Wizards isn't a D&D game, but it is an adventure fantasy game. At minimum, I have to explain the overall setting, then drill down into the specific elements that are super important, then I can hand wave a bit and use random tables to give the Judge the tools necessary to flesh out the rest. That's how I like to do it. 

 

Quick Thought on DTRPG

You see, I do all this stuff for fun, not for a living. I admire and respect my friends and cohorts who make a living at it. I do not.

I also never look at my DTRPG earnings. I'm terrible. I even neglect comments so that I see questions asked a year later. I'm terrible.

Anyway, I did run some quick numbers just out of curiosity. I predicted that the Black Pudding Heavy Helping books would be the ones that sold the most, and it's true. By a country mile. But I was pleasantly surprised that GOZR came in second to them. I had this feeling that while GOZR was the most labor intensive thing I'd ever done, it was a big fat super unknown. And it is... in the grand scheme who the hell knows about GOZR?

In terms of pure downloads, the Black Pudding zines are far and away the highest (5,678 "sold" for BP 1, for example). But they are also free (pay what you want), so that makes sense.

All told, if I had to live off what I'm earning on DTRPG, me and my family would have died a decade ago. But I kinda knew that already. I'm just stoked when anyone buys a copy of anything I do. I appreciate it! You help me keep going.

Rabbits & Rangers Ten Years Later

In August 2016 I published Rabbits & Rangers. That's ten years ago! Time flies.

I thought I'd look back on the book since I haven't touched it in many years.

First, I went with a traditional digest format, which is nice. The POD print book is compact, cool. Good job, me.

Layout was done by Matt Hildebrand and I have to hand it to Matt... this thing still looks cool to me. Thanks Matt!

Speaking of thanks, flipping through it this morning I didn't spot any errors. Oh I'm sure there are some that slipped through, but Andy Solberg lent his meticulous editorial eyes to this thing and I'm forever in his debt. Thanks Andy!

The Monday Doomslakers RPG group played this game. I ran an adventure called Sheep on the Borderlands... get it? So thanks to them for enduring it. We started gaming in 2014 and, with a few changes in membership, we're still going strong today (currently playing Boot Hill 3e!).

Ok, so anyway... here are some things about the book I had forgotten that I believe are quite good.

1. Size differential table. I kept it simple. Sizes are small, medium, and large. You get +1 or -1 based on where you fall on that scale compared to your opponent in a fight. Small vs. small +0, small vs. med the small guy gets +1. Small vs. large, small fry gets +2. I think that's elegant and simple.

2. Natures. Inspired by the exaggerated personalities of old cartoons, you pick or roll for a Nature. If you're a Bully, then you act like a Bully. If you're Rascally then you're always one step ahead. And so forth. I think this reinforces the cartoon inspirations, but isn't too intrusive.

3. Death options. This has become something of a theme in my games. GOZR certainly has this. In R&R, you get to decide if your character dies at zero HP or not. The choice comes with cost, of course. If you die, you get a benefit to your next PC. If you live, you're knocked down a few levels until you earn 1,000 XP. I'm not sure why I did it that way, honestly. If I wrote this today I'd just say you're knocked out for a few rounds and get back up with 1 HP. But that was 10 years ago and I was firmly entrenched in OSR thinking... the idea of letting a PC live after the dice called for death?? Preposterous!

4. HD limits and XP mods. I put a lot of thought into this book. Looking at it now, I see hundreds of files of revisions and ideas. I spent a long, long time on this bastard. The tone and logic had to work. So it mattered to me that a mouse Fighter and a moose Fighter would have the same HD and stuff. It doesn't make sense. So I put limits on them. The mouse has a d4 HD limit, even as a Fighter. But they get a beefy +20% XP bonus. I also applied ability score modifiers quite liberally, but with balance. The mouse, for example, gets +3 to Dex but -3 to Str. They also get +1 to Cha (cute mice!) and a bump to AC for being small and quick. All animals get similar considerations for their size, speed, and traditional characteristics.

5. 21 new spells, 18 new magic items, 14 new creatures*. Notes and advice about armor and weapons that work for the vast array of animal shapes. Like... you find some plate mail in a dungeon. You're a polar bear and your companion is a bat. What are the odds this armor fits either of you? Well, unless the LL already knows the answer, you roll 1d6 to see what size it is. Then maybe you roll a percentile to see if it's specialty. Maybe you'll get lucky and find a rare All-Fitting Armor, which is described in the book.

Some of my favorite little bits:

Stoat

The first level spell Ahkme's Catalog. The mage sends gold and a request by way of a magic bird to the laboratories of the geniuses at Ahkme. Within the hour, the bird returns with a package delivery containing an item that may help in their situation. You roll on a table to see if the thing explodes in your face or works like a charm. There's also a magic ring of Ahkme you can find.

Spells that target certain types, such as Down to Earth, a spell that grounds avian creatures.

The cute little animal portraits! I did one for each of the 50 animal types and I adore them, even if I drew them. I'm not above loving my own work. And it's so rare that I adore my own work from so long ago.

 

I'm waxing nostalgic now, but I have a hankering to run this again. What's more... there exists an expanded edition that started as a sequel. I did all the work of adding 50 more animals, some new spells, etc. I just didn't finish the work. It's something I'd like to do... but I would have to put myself back into a full on Labyrinth Lord mode and beg Matt to do an updated layout for the expanded edition. It would be worth it, though. Hopefully I would hold firm and keep to the classic LL format... complete with descending AC.

But there's also the strong possibility I'd want to change the whole thing to mesh with Black Pudding Play Book... and that would be awesome too.

The PDF is free to download. 

*Fun fact: the zard makes its first appearance here! I ported them over to GOZR later and I don't even know if I remembered they came from this book originally. 

 

Dead Wizards Ground Zero

Going on 10 years ago I got inspired by various sword and sorcery things to create a game called Dead Wizards. It's set in a sandy desert city. Very much a "sand and sorcery" idea inspired by mummy movies as well as Lankhmar and Conan and a bit of Al-Qadim.

My first pass at it was a hack of Swords & Wizardry where I think the main difference was that spells were cast by burning hit points. I ran that a couple of times.

A bit later I revised it and ran it again, briefly. Then I changed the whole system to be based on the image above, using the old to-hit matrix as the core mechanic of the game. Partly, this was a grognard response to anti-THAC0 folks. Just a bit of tongue in cheekiness.

I sometimes went hard to defend descending AC...

The idea shifted in 2020 and became a "let me see if I can make this a game based on those animalistic goons from the movie Heavy Metal." So I did. And it was called GOZR.

 

I say all this because I've been working on Dead Wizards again after a lot of years in limbo. I want back to the last and fullest draft of the game, which was pretty good, actually. The rules in that version are essentially GOZR.

 

I've abandoned the THAC0 matrix, mostly. But there is a small "to hit" matrix on the character sheet. Much simplified, it has 4 categories of difficulty (Basic, Arduous, Grueling, and Epic) with target numbers for each of them for only 2 basic skill areas (Cunning and Prowess).

 

I think this is a really nice amalgam of GOZR's simple target number system and the old to-hit matrices. It's easy on the eyes and intuitive. You're trying to do a daring leap to grab a sacred relic off the giant demon's head? Sounds like an Arduous task, at least. You roll 1d20 vs. your Arduous Prowess target.

 

Once set, the targets never change. But you can pick up various benefits here and there and acquire situational boosts. The idea here is to keep it player-facing and as math-less as possible. Target is 9, you need to roll a 9. You have an advantage? +1 to the roll. Oh, the demon takes notice and now is actively protecting the sacred relic from your grasp? It's now a Grueling task.

 

So those are just some thoughts about the game in development. Clever observers will note that I still haven't produced that space fantasy game, ZSF. Hell's bells, West... you already playtested it, you already have Troika! based books about the same setting. What's the hold up? Yeah, I'll get to it. Inspiration is fickle, you know.