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Prepping and my "Beach Trip" Campaigns

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For the longest time, I ran 1.5 hour campaigns. I would run them for my local youth club. There were rules set by the organizers that helped mold my prep. First, I had an 1.5 hour time slot total. That includes set-up, cleaning up after wards and gaming, so my sessions happened fast. Secondly, I only have around 4-5 sessions. I did largely oneshots for the first 2 years and the last one I did an actual campaign. My prep was guided by these rules and still help me today. Here is my prep process for that last 4 session campaign.  First off, rule system. 5e isn't big in my area. Gamestop ceased all operations in Ireland and they had the most tabletop stuff (dice and 5e mainly). I ended up creating a rough 2d6 system loosely based off of Kal Arath. At this point I would assemble all the random tables and spark tables I need. Secondly, I would prep the starting 3 missions. I like sandboxes and I found them easy to run as my players were part of a community. I prepped the mission by gett...
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Give your players Guns

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There is a game design phrase I heard a while ago called "The Myth of the Gun and the Myth of the Sword can't coexist". The Myth of the Sword is your power comes from you. The power you have is intrinsic to you. For example, Hulk from the MCU. I want to focus on the Myth of the Gun, where the items you carry is where you get your strength. An example would be Iron Man from the MCU. If the item breaks, you lose the power. Oftentimes monster hit all parts of the character sheet, from rust monsters attacking your equipment to ghouls taking your levels. Here is where the Myth of the gun shines as your players have to come up with creative solutions to be able to use their Guns.   This ties nicely into a old OSR tenet, "The answer is not on your character sheet". This isn't perfect as there is one part of the character sheet that you should look at and that's equipment. When I play dungeon crawlers and the situation starts to become more and more dire, the...
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Splitting the cleric into the Holy Trinity

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I really don't like the cleric class. I feel that is assumes so much out of your world. That you have gods that you can worship and dedicate your life to and that you have undead that can't be reasoned with. I find these weirdly specific and Runequest kind of helped me visualize what a different way to approach gods can look like. I like how different cultures have different (and sometimes contradictory) myths and legends. I find it harder to achieve in Dungeons and Dragons as I couldn't focus on all the gods of a setting as the cleric's god had to have an increased importance than the rest of the pantheon because the cleric's god was the only god that mattered mechanically.  Furthermore, undead are boring to me and would like to add more unusual creatures. The undead I include often talk or are smarter than the average skeleton. I am not a fan of prescriptive 100% spelled out character abilities. I like that there are multiple applications for a lot of spells and m...
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Dungeon Pope and Other Jobs

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I was thinking recently about how games struggle with "Why are we Dungeoning? Are we even Dragoning?". Often times the reason to go down there is there's treasure or someone needs "Heroic warriors to clear out the savage barbarians". These aren't great as one is very colonialist which isn't morally good. Gold is fine but at higher level gold starts to have less meaning as you need thousands of gp to level up. Furthermore, I find that player want to pursue their own goals once they are higher level once they better slot into the setting.  The Goal with a Dungeon job is to find a way to integrate the players into the setting faster and gives better for motivation. Below are 2 examples of a Job. What makes a Job is this: The Job must have a goal that is relevant to the setting and it has to take multiple sessions.  The job results in a level up or foreground growth if you don't use levels.  People react to your Job. Some despise you, Some love you and m...
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Wastoid and the unwritten rules of rolling

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I played Wastoid a while back as a playtest. I am a big Fallout fan and Wastoid fit my ttrpg tastes and has some strong Fallout flavor. I did an exploration section, a section with NPCs and a combat. Combat was using some OSR I found that closest fit the Fallout vibe. First they had to fix a lighthouse, which was fine, I used the faction tables and exploration I liked along with the players. Then, they turned on a power station and combat was quick and brutal, 2 players went down but they fixed the power station. The table was so happy when the new characters both had hacking, which made the robot infested station much easier and interesting. One character that was rolled was a robot and they liked how there was risk and reward. Go in head first and you can get junk to heal yourself and you are immune to radiation making rushing in a good idea. But if you got hurt you lose valuable junk to healing yourself.  From Bethesda   Slots were something my players were mindful of and t...
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Tired of D&D 5.74? Here's a cool old school rpg from my childhood that can fix it.

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You may know me for being an OSR (Open Strategic Resources) blogger, a section of the TTRPG hobby that focuses on games that call back to earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Recently I found an Ebay listing (costing around $2000) on for a copy of an old game from my childhood.  This game came in a box set, unfortunately I lost the box while moving. It has some things that are sorely missed in an age of Dr Who Artilocks and Spongebob omni classes. It was more grounded, being a game of heroic fantasy. It had no crit chains and success percentages. Instead it had "Advantage" and "Disadvantage". It only had 20 levels and you had much less choice in abilities. Kids today would be bored out of their minds! Character creation was so simple. In an hour you could create a complete character. Pick your species, background, class and equipment. Maybe a subclass and spells depending on your choices.    The old lady gave me a set of her physical dice You had so much contro...
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OSR games should have a lot of classes

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I couldn't post to my blog due to life being a lot and various tech issues. I did however back the newest Shadowdark Kickstarter so now I feel it is time for a theory post, as I didn't post one in a while.  From The Arcane Library In OSR games, you die often. There are often around 4 to 7 classes (if the game sticks to the B/X model) and it doesn't take too long to play them all, at least each class's early levels. In shadowdark's newest kickstarter, there is plans for 20 classes to be in the one book. I like this. In modern games, having a lot of classes feels overwhelming as I am playing each class for a long period of time due to the lower lethality in those games so my choice matters a lot. In shadowdark, this isn't the case. Death is not only around the corner but right behind you and should your plans go south, that's the end of the character. It is unlikely I will be playing a character for a significant amount of time in shadowdark.  The 24 classes t...
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