Personable Thoughts

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a destitute adventurer, in possession of a sharp blade, must be in want of a hole. Holes are after all where the treasures live, guarded by orcs and worse. Of course, in modern parlance, we like to call these holes "Dungeons", and if we want to get real fancy, they're "The Mythic Underworld". This is because, indeed, it does not make sense that one would store that much treasure in what is, essentially, a hole in the ground. Even at the best of times, going underground is a scary prospect, untold tonnes of earth and stone hanging over your head, ready to collapse at any moment if not properly secured, burying you with your treasure for all eternity. Sensible people build castles, it's less work. Maybe a little basement underneath, but none of this deep cave stuff. That's delving too deep, too greedily. This means that normal people don't put their treasures in big dungeons deep underground. People with lo...

  After two iterations of the age of Industry, and once in the age of electricity, Chris McDowall, AKA Mr. Bastionland, has decided to tackle the age of heroic fantasy , of the Arthurian persuasion. Rather than the explorers of Into the Odd and debt-ridden failed careerists of Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland concerns itself with Knights on a Quest. Like previous games set in the world of Bastion, the rules are light as they come, though with a little bit of added complexity in combat in the form of Feats and Gambits, as well as wrinkles related to weapon types, mounted combat, and mass combat. You know, knight stuff. Besides that, it's just the usual three-stat roll-under and no to-hit roll. It all sounds cool and fun. In total, all of this ends up filling a total of sixteen pages, including the GM advice for running the game. At the end of the book are 30 pages of play examples with commentary (the "Oddpocrypha"), with the rest (the majority of the book) are ...

  This week, I did something that is probably rarer than it should be in the tabletop RPG sphere: I ended a campaign, rather than let it fizzle out or changing tracks and leaving it hanging. I have had a few people ask me about the campaign and my thoughts, so I figured I would write it up as a blog post. I have previously written my thoughts on the game, Songbirds 3e , and my overall thoughts on the game haven't changed much, so if you're more interested in review-like thoughts, that's the post you should be reading. In this post, I'll rather instead be focusing on the campaign itself, taking a bit of a bird's eye view on how it ran, the choices I made, and a write-up of the general story. I'm not very good with keeping session notes (read: I don't take or keep any notes), so I will be relying on my memory for this, as well as looking at the prep I did. Relying on the adage of "prep situations, not plots", many of the situations I prepared are ga...

Theodor Kittelsen 1870s, Photo: Nasjonalmuseet/Ivarsøy, Dag Andre   Once again, I am stretching the definition of "big book", firstly because the Cairn 2e books are not that big, at least compared to chonkers like His Majesty the Worm or The Hidden Isle , and secondly, because I am actually looking at TWO books: the Player's Guide and the Warden's Guide. There were in fact several more books in the box set, but most of those were also Players Guides. For the purposes of this review, I will cover the idea of the box a bit, but mainly focus on the contents of these two "core books", rather than the adventures. The second edition of Cairn is, like the first, written by Yochai Gal. The books have beautiful cover art by Bruno Prosaiko and interior illustrations by Amanda Lee Frank and Keny Widjaja. I have played a little bit of Cairn 1e (a single session in fact, unless my memory betrays me), so while I have a passing familiarity, I am not deeply enmeshed in ...

  The Pope is deader than the OSR, and we're posting through it. For this year's conclave, here's a post about hierarchies in organised religion and how to make it gameable. In fantasy role-playing games, we are likely to be presented with a pantheon of gods (even if the depiction of polytheism does not match how it has been practised historically, or indeed today). Dungeons and Dragons also has strong Christian underpinnings , even if it is not explicitly written. Taking what we have and running with it, the Cleric class should thus bear some resemblance to the clerics of real-world religions - that is, they are a member of a religious organisation with a hierarchy, in which they have a specific role and rank. Following a Christian template, this means that they should be ordained - otherwise, you are a lay preacher and explicitly not a member of the clergy . Of course, playing a parish priest is not necessarily conducive to fun dungeon-crawling adventures, so they wou...

Liden Gunver og Havmanden , 1841, Edvard Lehmann Like all good recipe bloggers, I have added a big preamble about why I wrote this, and my thoughts on Cairn 2e backgrounds. If you just want the advancements, scroll down! I have been reading the Cairn 2e books (more on that in a later blogpost), and something about Cairn that has always been frustrating me a bit is the lack of special traits or similar to make characters unique, rather than blank slates defined only by their items and a handful of stats, and whatever the player puts into them. For a long time, people have told me, "Cairn 2e backgrounds fixes this", and I have stubbornly told them, "I will read that when I get my box set, then." Lo and behold, my box arrived a few weeks ago, and indeed, some of the backgrounds contains what I want. But only a few of them, and often just as one or two entries on the roll table. Many backgrounds contains the kind of abilities or traits I want, but tie them to items with...