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Recently I watched a video about all of Brennan Lee Mulligan's house rules for Critical Role Campaign 4. Brennan Lee Mulligan is taking a West-march like approach. Already some old school heads are curious. I was immediately interested when Brennan said "I am employing a very different strategy with the big bad to honor the things I admire the most about this table which is I don't know who the PCs will determine to be their big bad.". Mr Trad went up on stage and said prep situations not plots to thousands.  Brennan Lee Mulligan Death and Dying Actions Already the campaign is different from most with a few major house rules. First there are death actions. if you are rolling death saves, you can get a different action based on if you got a success or failure and how many success and fails you have. (For example if you succeed a death save you can give another player heroic inspiration) Now, for an OSR scenario, this isn't viable. But I would twist it into if you d...

I was rewatching some old Mr Beast videos and I noticed a segment where he got a couple contestants to a room. The floor was covered in the stickiest glue in the world and the only thing the contestants were told was "This is the stickiest floor in the world! Now get across it.". This really got me thinking about traps in my game and making them more puzzle like. The glue floor has a number of traits that make it a good puzzle. First off it has multiple approaches to interact with it. What you see in the video is contestants throwing their shoes and socks onto the floor as platforms and jumping the remaining distance. You could power through it, push someone onto it or wash the glue away. That is a lot of different approaches to this trap and that's before magic enters the situation.   Before I continue, I understand that Mr Beast is a controversial figure. I am not sure what the controversy is about and I don't follow the slop. I don't interact with any Beast med...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.  ...