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Why?  Spells in a vancian casting system feel too rigid and don't feel connected to other wizards in the setting. I had a dream a few nights ago of an unusual setting. If I can remember more I can post it on here. The dream happened before I had a blog. The class that used this system was a mud prophet, an orc class. They were focused around the unpredictability of fate and how fate could effect their casting. I also wanted metamagic like the 5e sorcerer but wanted it to work in an OSR setting. Spellcasting When a Prophet casts a spell, they look at their cauldron to see it's state since the last casting. Every day, the spell's property changes. A celebrity casts magic missile? suddenly the darts do 1d8 damage per dart instead of 1d4. Magic missile is taken off the wizarding curriculum? It now takes a full round to cast, only shooting once it's finished. Every spell has three things defining it. Implicits are things that every spell has like duration, spell level and ra...

Clarification Time Turns out Heso was spelled Jesu and kinda polytheism kinda monotheism found in most elfgame settings actually has historical roots where in the near eastern and Mediterranean cultures, they practiced religion in a similar fashion since they have "pick a deity out of the pantheon" situation when it comes to worship. I still don't like this in my fantasy game. I also should have been a little more clear on how gods are general concepts, but different towns have different gods for those same concepts. For example, a desert village would have Sarivi the Healer being a god of rain. A coastal village would have their god of rain as a more hostile deity since fishing in the rain or in a storm isn't recommended. They would have Cassina the Skyblight as their god of rain. Desert village would have a Rain Day to celebrate the life giving water while the coastal village would have a Rain Day to appease the god and hope for no storms. Extremely narrow gods are ...

Petty Gods It is my birthday as I am writing this and I thought about gods in OSR ttrpgs. I received Petty Gods: Revised and Expanded Edition and it got me thinking about how cooler religions could be with lots of smaller gods rather than one or a couple gods. I don't like clerics as written since they have the most assumptions about a setting. Fighters assume going into combat is a regular thing, magic user assume magic is a thing and a common thing and thieves assume there is crime. Clerics assume that there are undead, religions and gods. That's a lot and I often find in settings that are more distant from the traditional OSR fantasy often rework or replace the cleric all together since an assumption of the cleric clashes with the setting.  From Rended Press   Besides, The only classes I respect are Warriors and Wonder people. Cleric does a decent job at both and it annoys me. The main idea of clerics is they pick from a pantheon and dedicate themselves to one particular go...

1d6 weird trees and their rituals  Happy Christmas everyone. Secret Santicorn is this year and this was Panic Pillow's prompt . 1. The Gorana Oaks are a medium sized white tree with large, rectangular yellow berries and pine tree like leaves. A common ritual before a long journey is for all of a traveling group has to climb the top of the tree and eat the highest leaf, hoping it would give you safe travels so that when you return, you can eat the fruit. Rumor has it any demons who eat the leaf get inhumane amounts of stomach pain. 2. A Calvius yew tree is large, brown tree with thin, light green leaves. A common folk cure for a easy childbirth is to put the mother-to-be at the bottom of the tree and have a relative blindfolded at the top of it. The yew bark leaves a slippery sap during winter. Once the relative gets down from the tree without aid and lives, the child will be born and nature will have a new ally. 3. Wyrdwerwood is a small, grey tree devoid of leaves year round that ...

Events   Players  Necro  Selune Volkhv  Ante  Wolf  Garmadon   The party enters with Selune just about dodging a falling column trap.  They find a group of werewolves that converse to the party with a high reaction roll.  The wolves give Ante the gift of lycanthropy thanks to Ante winning a duel and Wolf pledges to aid them.  The party then finds a group of religious order of warriors hunting werewolves. The party hates them.  Selune sneaks past and grabs the relic from Wind that Whispers, the leader of the werewolves.  The rest of the party try to take out the leader of the holy order. The party abuse the fairy dust set on tracking werewolves and throw it in the leader’s eyes, stunning them.   From Fromsoftware Wolf successfully douses an amulet from the werewolves in the blood of his enemies gaining werewolf abilities.  The party enters combat, Necro scares half of the warriors with a spell and there are 4 warriors ...

Spore and XP I am currently designing my heroic OSR game. One big touchstone for my heroic OSR game is Spore, a game developed by Maxis. In it, you gain DNA points to grow from a cell, to a creature, to a tribe, to a civilization and ending at galactic force. I intend to focus on the creature stage as you stop evolving after the creature stage.  You can gain DNA points from eating plant matter and other creatures to later, befriending and killing other species. I thought I could just replace gold with DNA and call it a day. That felt lazy and did some further thinking. Why do these creatures want treasure? They aren't even fully sentient. So I created a XP checklist inspired by games like Dungeon World and Vagabond. Since I don't use XP for gold, the only reason I had it was for shopping. Shopping is the bane of my existence in ttrpgs so I just decided than and there that there was no gold and shopping, instead treasure can be more ordinary items like rope and 10 ft poles.  ...