GOZR Lulu Copy

I got my print proof of GOZR today! It looks pretty slick. However, my main issue is that Lulu charged about three times as much for these as they cost from Ka-Blam. I am not sure why. So I've ordered some copies from Ka-Blam too. When they come in I'll compare the quality and then I'll know. In the end, unless Ka-Blam has went downhill since last time I used them, I'll probably just use them for POD.

Thieves! Dirty Rotten Thieves!

Of late I've been thinking about classic D&D. When I think of D&D I always think of B/X D&D, the classic basic rules from 1981 compiled and edited by Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Steve Marsh. That's my jam and probably always will be. It is a clean presentation of the original D&D rules with some tidying up, some clarifications, some stripping down, and some additions.

It is imminently hackable. It melts over new settings like butter on hot bread. When I think about writing fantasy settings for RPGs I always favor using this rule set as a basis, usually via the use of the game's most effective modern clones: Labyrinth Lord and Old School Essentials.

Thinking about B/X lately lead me to recall some of the posts I made about the topic in the past. I wanted to revisit some of them with fresh eyes and see if my thinking has changed.

Thieves' Skills is one of my favorites. I can't remember if this idea started as a G+ post and then I cleaned it up for a blog post or if it was the other way around. But I do remember when the idea hit me and suddenly thieves and their terrible skill ratings clicked into place and made sense.

Thieves' Skills

WHAT DO THE THIEVES SKILLS ACTUALLY MEAN?

You're playing a Thief. You want to pick a lock. You take a peek at your sheet and see that your chance is 15%. That sucks! Surely you can do better than that?

I think you can. I think the Thief's skills are not meant to replace existing stealth rules (such as they are), but to augment them. This is what I mean:

You try to sneak through a room where some orcs are playing bones in the corner. The dice are thrown and the result is 55%. That's well above the 20% you needed to move silently. What does that mean? It means you didn't move silently. It does NOT mean the orcs heard you. It simply means you made some kind of noise that might be heard. So the DM should then make the normal roll to determine if the orcs heard a noise or not.

If you were a Fighter sneaking through the room you'd only get the second roll, not the first one too. So the Thief has an added layer of rules to cover stealth.

Same for hiding in shadows. A failed skill roll means you could be seen. It does not mean you actually were seen. When the Thieves' skill rolls fail you simply fall back to normal rules such as a surprise check or hear noises.

I don't know if this was how the rules were meant to be used or not but this is how I've been thinking of them for a long time. It makes a thousand times more sense to me now than before and it means I don't necessarily have to house rule the Thief (though in all honesty I still do...).

After making this post I revisited the topic several times. In the post THIEVES! I re-state the idea outlined in the previous paragraphs and I introduce my Thief class bennies system, which I later modified into the Black Pudding Playbook's Thief.

In the post Once Again With The Thieves I talked about a new public game I was running and how I modified these ideas once more to suit that table. In that post I outlined this method:

-Thieves roll their skill on percentile dice + an ability check at the same time. If the percentile roll is good, ignore everything else because they have perfectly executed their subtle craft and cannot fail. Otherwise, go with a simple ability check.

-Non-thieves do sneaky stuff on an ability check, usually with Disadvantage. They cannot do super-secret stuff like climbing sheer surfaces or disarming complex traps (unless the player has a terrific plan).

Looking at it now, I still think this method is very good for a public game in which you have no idea who will show up to play. It eliminates the d6 rolls for hearing noises and such, which would be harder to explain to a complete noob. Rolling d100 and d20 at once is fast and smooth. Using Advantage and Disadvantage is both elegant and well known.

Still, as a B/X fan, I want the pure experience so I want as few house rules as possible. I need a good damn reason to house rule.*

In that same post I re-stated the original idea again in a way that I kinda like:

The idea here is to say that thief skills are special. The thief isn't merely trying to be very quiet or trying to find footholds on a wall. They have been trained or have discovered lost secrets or have tapped into natural talents that normal people cannot access. The thief doesn't simply "hide" in shadows, they fucking disappear. If that percentile roll is a good one, the thief cannot be detected. They are as good as invisible, though not in a magical way.

In the post Thief! Stop Thief! I had an idea for using the default saving throws as skill categories. Check it out. I haven't used this and it isn't what I'm leaning toward today but it's a neat idea, right?

SUMMARY

My thinking in 2021 is similar to 2015 with regards to Thief skills. Use the skills as they exist, without altering the tables or numbers. But treat those skills as *almost magical*, where the Thief is perfectly successful on a good roll and falls back to the default stealth rules when they fail. For my money, this actually solves the problem with Thieves.

Beyond that, I'm also in favor of giving Thieves another benefit in the form of special tricks. It could be a standard list such as forgery and reading scrolls and what not. Or it could be left wide open so the player can decide what their tricks are. I dunno. I'll ponder that one a little more.

I have some thoughts about wizards too...

* And oh yes, I do house rule. I have many house rules. I don't use them always, but there are a few that are almost always in use (critical hits, luck points, wizards getting more spells).

ROC RPG

In my recent deep dive into storage I revisited an old game I designed in the mid-90s. It's called ROC RPG, which stands for Random Order Creations Roleplaying Game. I didn't get too creative with the title as it was just a simple system for me to use - not to publish.

I ran this system on numerous occasions between 1995 and 1999. I can't recall how many times, nor all the contexts. It was not robust in the technical sense. It was just a skeleton of a game, but it was enough for me to use in pursuit of the fine art of "wing that mother".

The game was this:

You get 20 points. You write down whatever skills, abilities, and special things you want and distribute your points between them. These are called traits. When you take action, you roll 1d20 + the points for your relevant trait. The GM would have a target number in mind or written down that you had to beat. At the end of an adventure you would earn maybe 1-3 points that you could use for more skills or to improve old ones.

That was the entirety of the game. I think the way I handled combat, wounds, and death was wing-that-mother. If it felt like you should be killed, you'd roll 1d20 + trait to avoid death.

Over time I added some crunch. Not much. I added Path (class) and Ability Level (level). So I think the way this worked was if you did a thing related to your Path you'd add your Ability Level to d20 rolls. Otherwise you would just use your traits. Still no hit point or death system to speak of.

This character sheet is for a slightly more robust version of the game.

GOZR Creatures + Design Talk

In this post I talked about how I'm doing creatures in GOZR. Not much has changed since then. My stat block is the same, but I added Pack to give you an idea of how many of the creatures might be encountered.

I think I already described the fundamental game system in this post. Clearly this game owes a lot to games that came before it, so I'm going to include a section shouting out my inspirations to the best of my ability. For certain, classic D&D (specifically 1981 era) had a massive influence and some of its language is maintained herein (hit points are there, and the damage ranges are fairly in line with D&D). The Black Hack's abstract treatment of distance is something I completely stole for GOZR. But instead of a usage die mechanic I actually prefer players to just keep track of their shit. So the charsheet will have an "ammo" tracker. My own game, The Pool, has its stamp on GOZR as well. You can spend GOOZ to add "game story facts". A direct nod to The Pool and the early story gaming movement.

One game that definitely has inspired me is Mörk Borg. However, I am not sure to what extent that game inspired GOZR. I did a little archaeology and found that I had made public posts about acquiring the Mörk Borg in mid-March 2020. But my oldest GOZR document is dated March 8 and it does not mention the Swedish death metal game, despite mentioning Black Hack, OD&D, Into the Odd, and others as inspirations. So I believe GOZR predates my exposure to Mörk Borg by a week or so. After that, the game definitely hit me between the eyes and I love it. So big shout out to Sweden for the inspiration.

Regarding mechanics... I'm not sure what I lifted from Mörk Borg that I didn't find in other games. The concept of subtracting armor from damage is pretty common. But for sure the overall no-fucks-given design aesthetic of the game was inspiring to me. Because clearly, when you see GOZR finished, you will not find a lot of fucks given. It's an early 80s hard rock/metal notebook doodle game. Sort of.

I am not sure how this will all play out. Yesterday as I worked on the project I had the epiphany that this is a "sketchbook RPG". Meaning: I'm composing it the same way I would approach pages in a sketchbook, but with more of an eye toward clarity and organization. It is definitely not a game that total noobs would likely pick up and run. I do assume a lot of pre-existing RPG knowledge. I am not including a "how to play" or "what is roleplaying" section. I think I even use the term "PC" without clarifying what that is.

It's going to be a hot god damn mess but I do love it. I'm 24 finished pages in! Some of these are dense with info, some are less so. Thus, sketchbooky.

I don't know the final page count. I was kinda hoping 28. But I haven't even got to the equipment, weird magic and tech items, weapons, random encounter tables, or adventure yet. Holy shit. This might hit 44 hand-crafted pages before I'm finished.

See you in 2025.

GOZR: Belt Buckles

I was sitting here working on GOZR one fine morning when I thought to myself "that white space could use a fine belt buckle". And so was born the gooz cultural fascination with them.

Like many things in the game, this is just some random table shit. See that half moon by the title? Wherever you see that moon you know that's a table you can roll on, if you feel like it. It's optional.

GOZR Creatures

Here's a sample of the creatures from GOZR. Still a work in progress, but the stat block is very simple.

THREAT: This number ranges from 0 to 7+. It is the number of times the creature can make additional attacks or other actions or force re-rolls.

DEF: Defence is the number subtracted from damage. Always a minimum of 1 point dealt on a hit.

HP: Hit points.

SIZE: Small, gooz, large, giant, and huge. The creatures of this world will lean to the large size. Lots of megafauna. Also, creatures are assumed to be of animal intelligence. Intelligent monsters are not a thing, generally. But you can get some interesting behavior just looking at the animal world.

DMG: How many hit points of damage dealt per attack. Generally based on size, but varies.

Beyond that, I'm avoiding an obligatory description as each will have art. Instead, just going to include some bullet point notes about behavior, special attacks, defenses, etc. I'm also including tables for creating creatures on the fly.

An RPG Folder Reborn Then Killed Again

Continuing this series right here.

Time to look through some more random PDFs in my unsorted, messed up RPG folder.

Strike the Sandwhich by L.L. Blumire is 7 pages PDF in which exactly 1 page is content. I mean, it has a cover, which is cool. So we'll say 2 pages of content, counting the cover. So there are 5 other pages... some blank, some with legal mumbo jumbo. I'm not sure why on earth you'd do a PDF like that. Seriously... this entire thing could have been 1 page sans legal or 2 pages if you just want to include the OGL bit.

But ok, what is the content? It's an alternate hit roll system for Old School Essentials or any OSR type game. The idea is that you have an alternate AC method and a new "hit class" number. To hit your target, roll anywhere between those two numbers.

I mean... ok. But why? I don't want to be harsh to small publishers (I'm one of you), but I just don't know why this is needed. Or even desirable. It just feels like something you cook up as "you COULD do it this way" without much concern for why the hell would you. But you know... it's a simple enough system and I'm sure it works just fine. I just can't imagine why you would want to introduce another complication to solve a problem that kinda isn't a problem.

If I'm just not getting it because I'm possibly dense, feel free to comment and clarify.

Spell: the RPG by Taylor Smith seems to be a whimsical RPG (it's in the title) about casting spells. I have not read this, only skimmed it. I love the look and feel. I believe this is a game in which your actual words maybe determine what kinds of magic you can create, perhaps similar to The World Tree. I'm not sure though. Will have to read up.

Skimming it... looks like you use letter tiles, ala Scrabble, to build spells. I mean this sounds pretty dope*.

A criticism is that there's no table of contents. You just drop right into the book. And there's no index. For a 64 page game book to have no contents page and no index seems like a huge oversight. You can't just skim 64 pages and find stuff easily. You need some guidance.

*Can I say "dope"? I'm a middle aged white guy in Kentucky. Oh well.

Invasion of the Tuber Dudes by Ahimsa Kerp is a first level Old School Essentials adventure. I haven't read it yet but I'm adding it to this post because the title is funny and page 11 (12 of the PDF) features a new class: the skellington.

Skellingtons are great. They enter the adventure because PCs that drink from or fall into a certain clear river have a high chance of turning into a skellington. The immediate effect is they instantly become skeletal and gain 2d10 hit points. There's a funny bit that if there is a cleric present, they are immune to that cleric's turn undead ability... but only that cleric. So after this point the PC is dual classed as a skellington. They never again advance in their original class and only advance as a skellington. I mean... I love the shit out of this.

This one is worth it for the skellington class if nothing else. I'm a huge fan of adventure perils that utterly transform PCs. In campaigns I have ran, PCs have been turned into cyorgs on numerous occasions and a monkey at least once. The best part is that when given the chance to reverse the monkey transformation, the player said no. He liked it.

Robots Are People

As is my wont, I suddenly had a fixation on a thing in recent days and that fixation is only growing. You may have noted my many posts in the pinup art vein, a fixation I've had since I was 20 years old. That's not new or sudden, that's just me.

But now robots. Why robots? You know, I didn't even like the animated movie Robots. I can't remember why, exactly, but it felt disjointed and ungrounded to me. Or it was just too generic. I don't know. I didn't even love all the robot stuff in it.

But I love me some god damned robots. And I've been drawing a lot of them lately. I think the impetus was that I can just start drawing a robot straight to inks without a sketch. I mean... who's going to call me out on bad anatomy? It's a damn robot. Show me the correct anatomy.

Drawing robots is like drawing monsters. You can invent as you go and it's a brilliant, freeing experience. So I'm continuing to draw them daily. And of course, naturally, I'm noodling an RPG out of it.

I haven't made much progress on the RPG. I don't have a plan. I just have some notions.

Working title of the game: My Metal Skull

I flirted with My Metal Head, but the ubiquitous nature of "metalhead" signifying heavy metal music didn't mesh with my concept. I mean, I am a metalhead... but the game isn't going to be metal in that sense. It needs to be more fluid than that, not quite so locked-in to such a specific cultural aesthetic.

Some early game design beats*:

1. Like, this is a game about being given an identity (you were built, after all) and then having the autonomy to change and grow into your own robot. So it should have elements of random character creation along with choices (point buys, maybe). But the real meat of it is the way you evolve through play. No levels or anything like that. You just change organically. You find modules you can add to your body, or you lose them. And the catch is that adding a module alters you fundamentally. So you have to constantly make decisions about what kind of robot you are and what kind of robot you want to be.

2, It is RPG adventure. So there's a focus on danger, exploration, etc. But also it's got to have a strong social component. These are robots without living human masters. They are trying to figure themselves out. You need social mechanics.

3. Weights. I don't usually give a damn about encumbrance. But here I'm leaning into it. Your body will be composed of various elements (chassis, CPU, modules) and each will have a weight given in kilograms. You'll have to keep up with that stuff a little bit because you're a robot and knowing your physical parameters is important.

4. Lots of cool modules. Like skills, spells, magic items, etc. The modules you can acquire or build speak to who you are and certainly what you can do. So these are important and I want to have a ton of them pre-written with nice clean rules for making your own.

5. Setting. All I know right now is that humans are gone. So it's "post-apoc" in that sense. But I don't want to call this a post-apoc game or make too much of the fact that people are gone. People had their time and that time is over. Now it's robots' time. I'll lean into the fact that robots can trace their origin to people and thus "humanity" is something perhaps many robots seek to emulate. Also, I'll lean into the far-future nature of the setting and have some funky cool evolutionary stuff with wildlife and with wild tech. I have not decided if this will be space-faring yet. It kinda makes sense to make it space-faring. But it's "hard" sci-fi at least in the sense that there's no FTL drives. So the robots may tool around the solar system, making the setting the solar system and not just Earth.

6. Some have asked if this will be a Troika!-based follow-up to Supercalla. I certainly have had that Troika! that make it less ideal for this project, as much as I love that game. So no, this will not be a Supercalla expansion**.

*I was noticing recently that "beats" is a term used by various people when talking about their RPG projects. I found that interesting because it's a thing I've used in my private journals for decades. When would noodle a comic idea I'd write down "five beats" about the comic and then riff from there.

**I say that, but I'm in the earliest possible stage of development. Everything could change tomorrow.

Psi Battle

I drew this for Dyson Logos' Psi World zine Communiques From the Psi Underground. This came about because one day I happened upon some Psi World art and within a day or so I had purchased the PDFs and we were playing the game.

Here's the thing we've learned about this game. It doesn't want you to do psionics. I know this because if you create new characters by the book and you try to use your powers in the game you will very very quickly run out of juice. It feels like the starting Power Points are just too low for lots of psi action. Characters tend to have 20 or 30 PP, but even relatively minor powers often eat up 10-20 points per use. It feels like the equivalent of an old school D&D first level Magic-User... one zap and you need 8 hours sleep.

There are other weird things about the game. For example, the power called Detect Emotion costs 5 PP and lasts for a minute. Which sounds OK, except that you can't just detect emotions in general. You have to name an emotion and then detect it. So if you say "fear" and the GM decides the NPC is not afraid but is angry, you won't detect anything at all. Which, to me, seems to fly in the face of classic psychic characters. I want my PC to pick up on emotions in general. I want to scan a person and say "He's feeling scared, but more so... angry!". You can't do that with rules as written.

They do not want you to use psionics. They make the game very punishing to Psis.

Oh there are other oddities. The hit point calculation system is bonkers, for example. But overall it's a fine little game. It runs pretty smoothly. Just has some hiccups.

State of the Random Address

Hola! What have I been up to during the global pandemic?

Y'know. This and that. I have been consistently working from home for my job, which both a blessing and a curse. I dislike having the realities of the day job invade my creative physical space. But alas, these are strange times and I'm just thankful to be employed.

On the creative side, I spent a few weeks working on GOZR, which I'll talk about more at a later time. It's a fairly time-intensive project because each page of the game is art, fully lettered by hand, illustrated, etc. Plus the creation and writing of the game's mechanics all wrapped into that makes it a slow, slow process with a lot of revising and tweaking after the fact. When I'm done, I'll have something like a 24-32 page game book in comic book physical format (it's not a comic... it's just that I'm planning to print it in the physical form normally reserved for comics).

I took a step away from GOZR a little while back and started drawing a lot of more detailed pinup art. I went on a kind of pinup art spree actually, both in terms of drawing and collecting it. I have been obsessively gathering images from the web and organizing them into folders by artist. It's been a fun distraction, almost a passion.

Hell, it is a passion. Always has been, though. Thinking back, I remember my first real D&D character. Her name was Catina Catrid. She was a black-haired warrior-thief who wore a tiger-skin bikini and had magical claws as weapons. I drew her a lot. Fast forward to my early 20s and I was collecting and drawing adult comics. I have been into sexy fantasy art pretty much since the moment I laid eyes on the back cover of X1: The Isle of Dread. Damn you, Willingham.

Here's a REALLY OLD drawing from the 90s.

But of course friends of this blog will already know that I frequently go off on rants and tangents about this topic.

I have been gaming quite a bit. In addition to gaming every Monday night as I have for over 5 years (!), I have been running DCC RPG once or twice a week and playing in a Call of Cthulhu game once a week or so. And I've been running Psi World, which I don't think I could have seen coming. It's been a blast.

Moving forward, more of the same, I suspect. I'm in a mood to improve my craft. So I've been spending a lot of time studying and appreciating other artists' work and practicing my own craft. I've been thinking about what it means to be an artist and what I want to leave behind. Perhaps I'm more aware of my age and mortality these days. I dunno.

I haven't been in an OSR mood for quite some time. I wrapped up Black Pudding #6 and haven't touched anything related to OSR or D&D in general since, other than playing it every Monday. I don't think this means anything important. It's just part of the natural flow of my  mind. I go through long phases, and I often repeat them. The things I love the most repeat the most often. I have been a lover of D&D and RPGs since 1984 very consistently so I don't see myself "quitting" it, just stepping back a little from time to time. When I think about RPGs right now I am thinking about original systems, not OSR games.

That's it for now.

Psi World Slam

I ran session three of Psi World tonight. The PCs are all Psis (but no precogs!) who have been drawn to the small town of Enclave after a teenager with psionic abilities allegedly blew up the heads of seven people in a hospital. Gerry Muntrell, the teen, is said to have "went crazy" and killed several of his friends and a few doctors during a perfectly safe and routine medical study.

But there's more to this story. The players decided Gerry was innocent and needed to be freed from his prison in the basement of the Enclave Memorial Hospital. Upon discovering a sub-basement level reminiscent of a James Bond villain's lair, their suspicions may be proven correct.

Tonight they busted Gerry out and nobody got killed. It was a stealth mission and was successful, with the alarms going off just as they made their getaway with the young man.

I am off-book a little bit with the setting. I set my game early in the timeline so that the PCs are basically among the first generation of Psis to come out. Corporations run the world through a quasi-government known as IPEG (International Protectorate of Economic Growth). Many corporations are at the heart of IPEG and one of them, the Ranseur Pharmaceutical Company, is somehow associated with the hospital. Is it possible that the "special services" wing of the hospital is conducting illegal experiments on people with psionic abilities?

We're going to find out.

So far the system isn't getting in the way. Many people said this game's mechanics were a nightmare. I agree they are obtuse, but they aren't impenetrable. I have yet to run into a situation where I need to make a ruling and I don't have the tools to do it. The Attribute Saving Throws alone pretty much ensure that won't happen. But, to be fair, the game has been mostly about investigation and dialog and lots and lots of analysis paralysis (my Monday night friends are really good at going over ideas and plans for what might be called a minute or two). We have had at least one real combat and a few uses of psi powers. But I think we've had more skill checks and ASTs that anything.

Enjoying this old game quite a bit. It was a sudden move to run it and I'm glad I made that move. Especially since the group is really into it and Dyson Logos is even working on some super secret sauce related to the game as a result. Hmmmmm.

Free PDFs, Fool!

I don't think I posted this yet on the blog, only on FB.

I made the PDFs of these three titles free on DriveThruRPG. Go play some games, shut-ins.

Explore the Howling Hill! A low-level crawl.

Get lost in the Ice Forest! A low-level forest crawl.

Be a beaver, fossa, or rat!

What Am I Doing??

We are in a global pandemic, it is entirely possible we Americans will re-elect a psycho reality show clown as President, and I turn 50 this year (if I live long enough). Yes, it's mass fucking chaos everywhere. Not cool, universe. Fuck off.

So in the midst of all this mess what exactly have I been doing? In terms of creativity, of course. Nobody wants to know what I'm eating for breakfast or what I do at my day job.

I've been keeping busy. I recently did a character sheet for The Other Side Publishing, I did a special Virtual Gary Con shirt design, I'm working on a GM-screen thingie for a client, and I did a cover for a future issue of Phantasmagoria. I have also turned down some recent offers because I am working on personal stuff and trying to keep my bandwidth under control.

What started out as a serious attempt to finally write my sand and sorcery game Dead Wizards, which changed to Sand in the Bone, morphed into a completely different game idea about a month ago. It is called GOZR (pronounced GO-zur). It is based on the same game system as Sand in the Bone but is entirely different in tone. Where Sand strikes a more serious tone, GOZR is balls-out sci-fantasy in the vein of early 80s romps like Heavy Metal and Wizards. It is an entirely visual game too. Meaning... I'm hand-lettering the whole fucking thing. And it's taking forever but I'm loving it. Something about doing hand lettering is relaxing and fulfilling to me. I don't purport to be great at it. I'm not a master letterer. But I have fun with it and I'm practicing the craft, hopefully getting better at it.

The game itself is an experiment. There's been no playtesting yet and I'm composing a lot of the rules, such as they are, on the canvas as I go. But it's a simple game without a lot of moving parts so I feel confident it will work. After all, there's not much new to the idea of rolling a d20 vs. a target number, is there? We kinda already know how that mechanic works.

The game is presented visually and is table-heavy. In fact, it's pretty much all tables. When it's all said and done you will be able to use this slim volume at the table even with little or no prep and run a fun romp of a game for a bunch of goofy bastards playing goofy bastards.

There is a The Pool element to the game. I made a few posts talking about Sand in the Bone's sand mechanic and GOZR, being more-or-less the same system, also has this mechanic. Here it's called GOOZ but it does pretty much the same thing. Spending your GOOZ lets you influence the game-story by adding facts or controlling outcomes, with a bit of a risk/gamble mechanic involved. I think this will be fun at the table.

I plan to run some GOZR for the Monday night group the next opportunity I get. This will definitely be before I finish it, so I can make tweaks if playtesting suggests it.

So that's what I've been doing, for those who are curious. More later.

Oh, I should caveat here. I have a long and proud history of getting heavily into an idea and then abandoning it. I make no claims that GOZR will actually be finished. However, I do tend to muscle through and finish things after some critical mass has been established. I have pumped many many hours into this thing so far. I have several finished pages that took a long time to complete. Plus this is a sci-fantasy romp... and I tend to greatly enjoy doing those. What I have a problem with is the more serious, dry projects. I am not good with that. So odds are this will actually see the light of day.

(Man, I'm so god damn honest when I'm blogging.)

Richard Corben... definitely an influence on GOZR.

That RPG Folder Banned on Nine Planets

Great & Small is a game of animal fantasy by Robert F. Mason. It's based on OD&D. This is a little review of the quick start rules.

This game uses a form of Target 20, which is itself derived from the original game's design.

The idea is a simple one. PCs are animals in a dangerous world. I haven't read the entire PDF so I can't say for sure, but it feels like this is meant to be more realistic, less magical. Like you'd be dealing with animal factions and natural dangers rather than wizards and dragons. However, the rules do mention magic and magic items a few a times. This is a game system, not a setting, so it assumes you will build your own animal world and if you want magic stuff then you add magic stuff. This PDF doesn't include any of that stuff.

Though it is a D&D style game it definitely breaks the mold a bit. There are no classes or levels as far as I can tell. Which I love! I am more and more moving away from class and level myself.

Anyway, the game's mechanic is Target 20. You always roll 2d10 + mods in an attempt to score 20 or better. Now, I've voiced my distaste for games that use One Mechanic To Rule Them All... but I get it. It's a natural thing to want to do. And it certainly works. I just find it incredibly boring when a game has very little mechanically to interact with.

And yes, at the same time I strongly dislike crunchy games with too damn much to interact with. I'm a Goldilocks, sue me.

This game looks pretty nifty. The blog has a lot of information on it, much of which indicates more fantasy and magic than the quickstart suggests. I have no idea if the game is complete or still in production but the latest post was from July 2016.

By This Axe is a 12 page medieval fantasy battle game by Chris Kutalik. Yeah, that Kutalik!

This is a "mercifully short" book. No interior art, so the thing is all business. Layout is simple and clean.

I do not pretend to know a damn thing about miniatures wargming, nor do I care. It is not something I've ever engaged in nor had the inclination to engage in. Would I? Sure. I would. And By This Axe seems like a reasonable, short set of rules for doing so.

The only dice are d6s (and lots of them). You define your units in a way that is similar to an RPG. For example, they have Fighting Capacity, Armor Saves, and Special Abilities. There are monsters too. Seems cool.

Capture the Troll by Ken St. Andre (yeah, the Tunnels & Trolls guy!).

This is a 16 page GM adventure for T&T in which the PCs are summoned by the mad old fart of a wizard Mingoh the Moneyless to go forth and capture a troll for for his wondrous zoo of monsters. The text makes some funny comments about how run-down and old the wizard is and that his crew of servants are also run-down and old (those poor middle-aged harem girls).

There's a nice map. It seems like a fairly simple little cave-crawl with some wilderness adventuring to lead into it.

There were some annoying typos in this. It's such a small book that every little mistake sticks out like a sore thumb. But small press, y'know? We love our small press and all its foibles.

Some cool art in here from the infamous S.S. Crompton (Grimtooth, Demi). The cool cover is by a dude named Darrenn Canton, who I have gamed with before and know a little bit. He's a Kentuckian like me. He's really damn good at drawing these husky, buff fantasy figures.

This post is a continuation of this series right here you can clicky clicky on.

Dungeon Punks

I did the cover for this. It's a self-described fantasy heartbreaker by James T. Hook. You should check out his blog where he tackles various RPG-related topics from PC death to the myths of the OSR.

Mörk Borg

I think the creators of the wondrously metal Mörk Borg really want you to know how metal they actually are. That's a faint emboss on the spine. Between the letters of the book title it reads "Psalm VII" and has an inverted cross at the end. Pretty fuckin' metal.

One of the brilliant little bits of the book is the Calendar of Nechrubal on page 16. Here we find a page of psalms and some simple mechanics that dictate when the world will end, by random roll. When the seventh psalm is reached, the world dies and you are instructed to "burn the book".

I will be watching for YouTube videos in which people actually burn the book or throw knives at it (which you are also encouraged to do).

EDIT: This physical book is lovely and makes you want to just touch it over and over again. Just sayin'.

Inspiration, Utility, Prurient Magic

An RPG experience isn't just at the table. I think for sure that actual play is the most important outcome for an RPG - that's what they are made for. But another important goal for an RPG is inspiration.

When I first jumped into gaming I was mostly doing it alone. The game books I owned, few though they were, were sources of endless inspiration. I read bits of them and flipped through to see the images, read the stats, etc. I got ideas. I made shit up.

When I create game books I want to inspire. I am actually less concerned with how much actual play occurs than I am with how much I inspire people to play and be creative. If you picked up some issue of Black Pudding and it gave you an idea that made you feel inspired then that is 100% fulfillment of my goal. If you then use the book at the table, that's icing on the cake.

As I move forward with my creative life I plan to embrace this attitude more fully. I plan to be a little more relaxed with how I create and just let things be what they are. I plan to make more books and I plan to make them with even more of an eye toward inspiring people. Sure, I still want them to be useful in terms of play, but the table utility is not and cannot be the number one priority or else I'll lose my god damned mind.

Let's call it 60/40 aesthetic/utility.

Speaking of inspiration... I found this little doodle. Obviously from some pocket notebook I was carrying around, probably around 2008 or so. I think this was an idea for a magic system with 7 magics. Given that the 7th magic is sexual, who knows what illicit ideas I was cooking up back then.

Come to think of it, this scheme has 3 different emotion/feelie based magics. I believe the Lovely school of magic was all about good vibes, healing, etc. Emotric was about emotions, mental states, etc. And Prurient was the horndog school.

The RPG Folder Van Damme Couldn't Spinning Roundhouse Kick

A continuation of this series, in which I clean out my "new" RPG folder and properly catalog this shit.

B.Y.O. Dungeon Rules: The Scrapbook RPG is a 15 page PDF by Jacob DC Ross, who I have never heard of. In fact I don't remember ever looking at this before.

I kind of expected to open this up and see a lot of images or pasted words, like a real scrapbook. But there are no other illustrations other than the cover and the whole thing is laid out in single column digest with a sensible sans font.

The introduction says this is a game you use for any genre and it's inspired by Troika! and, I think, the Fighting Fantasy books that inspired that game. So this is a good thing. I dig that. It also says it was designed for use with the author's line of dungeon chapbooks. Which also sounds interesting. However, if I'm being honest here, I always get a little disappointed when I see a generic system. I dig the ideas they might bring in terms of mechanics, but their universality leaves me cold and dead on the inside, like a man who's Mörk Borg has been converted to G.U.R.P.S..

So, after reading this book, I can say that this is more-or-less exactly what Troika! is, but with less style. Now, I don't mean that as an insult. This is actually a well-explained, tight little set of rules if you enjoy FF type games. It has all the standard stuff: Luck, Stamina, Skill, d6s only, etc. It has a couple of interesting rules tweaks. For example, it includes character abilities, which are slightly different from... oh wait. Now I see. Since this is a universal game, they changed the spells to abilities. But they work the same way. So instead of "I cast Mysterious Jolt" and subtract 1 Stamina you say "I'm using my Cunning Dash ability" and subtract 1 Stamina.

Abilities have levels just like skills, but are different in that they may have inherent limitations (use once per day, etc.) and they cost Stamina. These are like feats or other such game mechanics from other RPGs.

It does not have Backgrounds included. You have to invent your own. Which is fine... when I'm writing Backgrounds for something like Supercalla I'm inventing them as I go. This game just asks each player to do that on their own instead of rolling on a table.

Overall, seems solid. I could see me using this instead of Troika! if I had a really specific idea that wasn't weird enough for that game. I still don't know why it's called "the scrapbook RPG" but it's free.

Macho Women with Guns by Greg Porter with art by Darrel Midgette is a 13 pager that delivers on the title. You play the roles of tough females, usually with guns, doing adventure shit. Looks like this came out in the late 80s, according to what I read. Which is awesome... this isn't a game trying to look 80s, it is an 80s game. I also read that this doesn't have a PDF edition... but I have the PDF... oops... PIRACY!! There's also apparently a big, shiny version from Mongoose.

Chargen is point buy. Stats are things like Str, Dex, Macho, and Looks. You also have skills that add to your ability when using them. Then you roll equal to or under that number on 3d6 to do badass shit.

There are character advantages in addition to skills. So you can have stuff like teflon skin or a secret love.

You can do a Macho attack... being such a badass that you effectively diminish the Macho of your enemies and they might even just stare, stunned into submission by how fuckin' cool you look.

Apparently this was followed up by Renegade Nuns on Wheels and Batwinged Bimbos From Hell... so I want those.

Is this game sexist? I dunno. I can see an argument there, but I feel like the spirit of the game is pure and fun and any hint of sexism is relatively inconsequential and not worth whining about. Fight me if you want, I don't care.

Some funny and cool "monsters" from the book:

This is SOOOO 80s, and SOOOO cool. It needs its own RPG.

What's Up With All the Digests?

Every time I turn around I hear someone say that digest or A5 books are superior for gaming. In this mini-rant I am going to disagree. But the caveat is that I don't dislike digest. I'm not arguing that digest is a bad format for a game. I'm just arguing that it is not inherently superior. And, naturally, the force of this argument is going to depend on how you use your game books at the table.

I am a pretty traditional Judge. I use a screen. I keep my shit out of sight. It is my abode. So I like to have my primary game book lying open on the table before me, usually with various sheets of paper and dice on it. I can't do that with a digest. I have to hold a digest in one hand if I want to reference something. And that sucks because when I run meatspace games I stand up and use a lot of body language. So what I end up doing is just making copies of the relevant pages and lying them on the table instead.

I am not young. I will turn 50 in 8 months (kill me now please). My eyes are not great. I do not enjoy reading tiny font. Now, since many people who are into OSR-type games are also not totally young, most designers tend to make their font sizes reasonable even in digests. But sometimes you get those examples of a game that was clearly formatted for full size but printed at half size. Cue the strained eyes.

Fuck... I'm guilty of this too. Some Black Pudding pages were made for full size. Did you look at A Trolling We Will Go in the new issue? I apologize if I hurt your eyes. I drew that on a big canvas.

So for these reasons I don't believe smaller sizes are automatically better. I am fine with them, so this isn't as much of an angry rant as I was worried it would be. It just irks me when I hear people smack talk full size RPG books. "They're so heavy!" "I can't lug all that around!" etc. The vast majority of RPG books have always been full size. Did you spend your entire gaming career being pissed off because you had large books to deal with? I doubt it.

Anyway... make your books whatever size you wish. It's all good. Do weird formats too. Those are neat. But don't feed me that bullshit about digests being better than full size because that is some bogus nonsense, bucko.

(Now to work on my next 6x9 game book!)

Striding Warrior

This is art for my upcoming RPG, Sand in the Bone (formerly called Dead Wizards*).

I decided to lean pretty hard into the "sand" part of "sand and sorcery" on this project. I even re-tooled the setting map to eliminate some non-sandy environments as I found them to be utterly superfluous to the tone. I have this habit when I do setting maps to try to include all kinds of environments... like people will be disappointed if they can't do snowy north adventures in my sand and sorcery game.

This RPG will have an original system. It is not specifically OSR. It is not based on D&D. It also includes elements more akin to my old game The Pool. Specifically there is a risk element with a meta-game mechanic. And yet it is still a traditional RPG in the sense that there is a Judge and Players and they are separated at the table by a barb-wire wall of doom. I kid.

Sometime in the near future I will ask bribe my Monday Doomslakers friends to play this thing.

*If I can get some momentum on this I might do a supplement for the game using the Dead Wizards title. Hey... I can dream, can't I? Don't crush my dreams.