LootLootLore

 Inspirations I read the Blades in the Dark SRD and thought about the idea of the group having a sheet because I am creating a hexcrawl and I felt that gear usage is more of a party decision than an individual decision. Like everyone cares how much rations the party has and who has what gear is also important so I decided to make something that plays with that idea. My favorite thing in video games is unlocking a new character after I beat a game like Shovel knight and Plague of Shadows. This gets close.  From Yacht Club Games Sample Group Type The [Faction name and group name] Reasons to adventure Day to day reason More difficult reason that is done once a month or so Large faction goal that is a once off event  Stat generation system for rolling a character in the faction along with maybe a passive advantage and disadvantage. List of items they can start with that they pick and choose  Armour or protective equipment  Weapon or offensive equipment  Equipme...

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 ...

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 ...

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.  ...

How did we get here? I read up on the Pendragon ttrpg and I thought about having a legacy by playing your characters next of kin. I also found out about legacy games that change based on the events of previous games. I was bored one night and decided to combine these, finding as many resolution mechanics as I can and adding them to the possible ways that your next of kin will resolve dice. I asked my players and one of them said and I quote "No child of mine rolls a d100 for anything, we are a family with standards!" From findmypast.ie Generations  First you roll for siblings which varies by species but for humans they roll 1d6-1 for siblings. At this point, you choose a resolution mechanic like 1d20 roll under. This is what you roll to resolve checks.  Then roll 1d6 for each sibling and any children you have (be it born, adopted, built or otherwise). On a 1-3 on a d6 the person will use the same resolution mechanic as you. On a 4-6 they roll on the Master List.. I am current...

So, one of my players is interested in Slavic folklore and asked initially to play a druid in my Land of Legend campaign. When he learned that advancement was more diagetic he immediately asked where is a volkhv. That was the origin of a new type of Talent called Archetype talents. These are the closest thing to classes. They are a group of talents you pick from to help fulfill a particular character concept. For example, Minor Shapeshifting, Omen Seeing and Animal Speech would be abiltie that would fall in the Archetype of Volkhv. Now, once my volkhv player saw this he instantly asked me questions about how volkhvs are seen, any famous ones etc. He wrote what his character knew and the next day I had around a page of volkhv lore to play with, combining what he knew and what I knew.  From Wikipedia A Volkhv The big problem with researching volkhvs is that there's conflicting information. Some sources say they are demigods, some say they are similar to shamans using nature to do mag...

I was thinking about MMOs lately with the news I hear every so often about Ashes of Creation and Thrones and Liberty. They inspired me to go out and try to find a unique MMO. Turns out it's hard. I found Maple story which is this unusual 2D platformer/rpg and I got inspired to make the dark knight class from it and throw it into my game. There will also be a version for you GLOG people out there.  From Nexon.com A Dark Knight Land of Legend   Genvene's Grim Gaze  Requirement: Locate a Dark Eye and successfully ruin a holy shrine before the Eye does.  +1 Wound Maximum When you activate this ability, a large spear surges from the Evil Eye's location and hits a target within your line of sight. This deals 3 wounds and heals you for 1 wound. You cannot heal over your maximum wounds using this ability. Once the ability triggers, roll. Failure means you cannot use this ability again until the next downtime.  GLOG Dark One's Lost When the Dark One said "I shall bring s...

There are many ways to move in the lands of legend. Detailed are 3 ways. A way forward, up and down.  Across The great beasts known as Karrukin. They are large, enduring creatures. Popular among the Southern Highlands, these creatures look like rabbits. They are the size of a pony and have cloven hooves. They love to eat moss, particularly the yellow moss of Mount Arvis. Their copious amount of fur makes them a must have when crossing alpine climates. They cost the same as horses. They move twice as fast through mountains and jungles but move twice as slow in plains and deserts.    From Reddit. This but bigger Down There is a moss that is grown by people of the deep. It is bright yellow and once you touch it, you slide down as gently as a feather. It is extremely flammable so efforts to grow it everywhere often end up running out of steam. There have been a few specimens found in the peaks, especially on Mount Arvis. There o nce was a general who, in their infinite wisdom...

My in person game is starting up. I have chosen to avoid a system for a number of reasons: I am given an hour and a half per session. 90% of my players are new to tabletop. My player count varies. So I have chosen a simple system that they create. One thing I love to leverage is what fantasy does everyone have in their heads. Some have LotR, Harry Potter more lesser known books or movies. There is also video games. Because of this, "fantasy" isn't a singular set of tropes and conventions but multiple.   But how? Characters are simple. Here is the character sheet drawn in Microsoft Paint: a rough mock up of the character sheet Path:  There are only 2 choices. Steel for martial warrior types and Spell for spellcasters. These set how many wounds you can take, whether you get access to magic or deeds. Steels get 2 wounds before getting unconscious, the ability to do mighty deeds of arms if their dice matches. (this is a 2d6+mods system). Spell gets the ability to cast magic (...