Personable Thoughts

  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...

  In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game. I think it is a well articulated critique, echoing some points made in Dwiz' review over on Knight at the Opera (now sadly unavailable). However, as a self-professed "system-curious indie guy", I think Paul underestimates the value of a simple but effective chassis (or at least, he comes to the conclusion that it is not what he wants out of a game). The strength of the stress system is how simple it is to interact with - yes, the rules in the booklet may not be enough to fully drive play on their own, but perhaps that was never the intention? I would argue that the core rules of Mothership offer just half of the game, with the other half left open to be filled by modules or an enterprising game master: The quality of the rules should the...

  Inspired by a discussion in the RTFM Discord, I have decided to write up some thoughts on how the properties of a modern "roguelike" video game could be adapted to a tabletop RPG. Of course, there is a whole nomenclature discussion to be had about modern "roguelikes" greatly differ from the original Rogue and its likes Angband , Zangband , etc. and is now essentially just a marketing term. However, I will nevertheless root this in modern "roguelike" conventions, as the originals could essentially be emulated by just playing an OSR dungeon crawl . Let us first define the specific genre conventions that we wish to emulate: Gameplay structured around short-ish "runs". You always start at the beginning of the "generalised dungeon" and make your way deeper until you either die or succeed in vanquishing the final boss.  Dying rather than succeeding is the expected outcome for the first many runs. There is no going back to town to resupply...