Goblin Punch’s latest post introduces a monster that can make lights become “thin” and “greasy” and eventually die so that the party can be consumed by the darkness. What I love is that the thing affecting the torches and candles is a disease that lights can catch. This harkens back to his idea of rust being a disease that infects metal.

What other phenomenon from our world could be reimagined as a disease in our RPGs?

Barnacles

These inch wide crustaceans cling to damp stonework or submerged surfaces. If a creature brushes against them or steps on them they flip round and latch on. Their shells are hard as granite. They cling on very tightly and can only be chiselled off with sustained effort and tools (at least a dagger and something to use as a hammer).

Every turn spent in a barnacle-choked environment burdens you with enough barnacles to fill an inventory slot. It takes a full hour to remove them, or half that with perfect tools. Once removed they can be cooked to make a nourishing chowder that replaces a ration.

Monsters that have spent several months in the environment become fully encrusted, slowing them dramatically, but giving them improved armour.

A repost of my thread from Mastodon.

I'm very late to the party, but I just discovered Spinetooth Oasis, a pay-what-you-want B/X compatible adventure by @EvlynMoreau. And it's just fizzing with great, weird, gameable ideas. Here's a few in no particular order:

Adapted from here

Breakers: World of Dungeons is a RPG by John Harper that pits modern-day wisecracking characters, armed with C4 and Hazmat suits and plenty of attitude, against classic fantasy dungeons. A dimensional rift opens, someone picks up the batphone, and the heroes for hire descend into a mash up of the local amusement arcade and the Dungeons of Morgoth. Or the Sydney Opera house fused with a dragon's lair. Or anything else! That's part of the joy of Breakers: The GM can just pick a real-world location well-known to their playgroup, grab a one page dungeon and away you go.

Despite this, for our second session, I decided to write my own adventure from scratch, and we enjoyed it enough that I've written it up here for you to use as well. May I present to you Fire Swamp of the Whale:

Album cover, copyright Christopher Tin

Calling all Dawns in an album by video game composer Christopher Tin. I first discovered it through the Grammy award winning track "Baba Yetu", which is the title music for Civilization IV.

Each track on the album features lyrics from a different text in a different language, and the album melds diverse musical styles into the overall classical framework.

Looking around I could not find anywhere that collected all the different lyrics and their sources and meanings in one place. I started adding that information to the Wikipedia article, but it turns out that Wikipedia doesn't want to become a repository for song lyrics. So instead, I present them to you here. I hope you find them interesting.

These are not ordered within groups, but I like the books in the first group more than the ones in the second.

I have only allowed myself one entry per author. Some entries are a single book; others (marked with a †) are a trilogy or series that I'm treating as a single story.

Best of the best

• Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin
• The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien
• Mistborn†, by Brandon Sanderson
• The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Lankhmar, by Fritz Leiber
• Lirael and Abhorsen† by Garth Nix

This may give you some context for what follows: Regional Gothic meme.

• Your train terminates unexpectedly at Crewe. You get another train, which promises to get to your destination, but after an hour travelling through the dark you arrive back in Crewe again. The next train does the same, and the one after. There are no exits from the station, just more platforms, more trains glistening wetly in the rain.
• The train stops in the tunnel and the lights go off. This happens every day, and every day, as you sit in the darkness, you can hear… scraping sounds on the roof of the train. Chitterings. Once, something banged into the window right behind you, and you heard a feral cry. You pretended not to notice. You all pretend not to notice.

My own work. Source images: This lab coat from Gentleman's Emporium, used with permission, and  this magnet, used under licence.

I have previously written about Doctor Magnethands, a light-hearted party-game/story-game where a band of heroes try to stop the Doctor from destroying "the earth by firing his radioactive rocket castle on the moon into the White House on Christmas Eve".

I was asked to run Doctor Magnethands for a friend's stag party by the best man. He sent around an email which pitched the game as Jon (the stag) trying to rescue his kidnapped bride-to-be and the rest of us trying to stop him. That's a little different from the original game. In fact, it is inverted - instead of a single GM (Doctor Magnethands) presenting challenges for the rest of the group to overcome, it is one player overcoming challenges set by the rest of the group. Here is how I made it work.

Return to The Temple of Illhan Copyright  Dyson Logos. Used under these terms.

The Old School Renaissance, or OSR for short, is about playing and re-interpreting the original editions of Dungeons & Dragons which were released in the 70s and 80s. I have become very interested in OSR D&D in the last few months, and I am now running a campaign with some friends. I want to write about our game here on my blog. However, not everyone is familiar with this kind of game - this has certainly all been new to me in the last few months. So in this post I'll sketch out the nature of the game and in future posts I'll go into more detail.

First of all, I would like to thank Eero Tuovinen for his writing on this topic, and in answering the questions I posed to him.

There are many different views on what OSR means. What follows is just a description of the kind of game that I mean when I say "OSR".

My own work. Source images: This lab coat from Gentleman's Emporium, used with permission, and this magnet, used under licence.

Yesterday evening we played Doctor Magnethands which is a... thing. I mean, I guess it's technically a story game, but it's much too silly to deserve that title.

"In this game, you'll play superheroes who must defeat Doctor Magnethands as he prepares to destroy the earth by firing his radioactive rocket castle on the moon into the White House on Christmas Eve! Yeah! Because shut up, that's why!"

This is a silly game that is designed to be played by drunk people. The rules says "get drunk before you even think about playing this stupid game, and don't stop drinking until after you've finished" but we played whilst completely sober and had a great, side-splitting time. I guess we're just too daft as a group to need alcohol to be extremely ridiculous.

Intrepid is a story telling adventure game. You and your friends quickly create an oracle of a setting backdrop, character names, place names, important themes, factions and quests. Then, following simple but powerful rules, you improvise from that basis to create exciting adventure stories. It's really fun, and you can play a whole game in an afternoon.

Both games I have played have been buckets of fun. In the first we told the stories of the race for a lost city in a desert filled with sand ships and strange monstrous witches. The denouement tied together story threads that we had never planned to be related into a satisfying whole that suggested the magic of that world went deeper than we had expected. Plus, I got to play a nomadic sand-ship pirate who was made of pure awesome.

Knytt

I have been sitting on these games for a while, depriving you of them, for which I apologise. Here are five more short, free games made by small teams or individual developers that I am happy to recommend to you. Please read, play, and let me know in the comments what you think of these games.

Cascade by Arrowfire Used with permission

The man blinked, rolled over, and stood up, gathering his blue robes around him. He found himself by a pool of water, deep in a forest he had never seen before. He reached out with his magical senses even as he began to slowly turn and survey the ancient trees. Using those senses always reminded him of the time he had first begun to learn them, in another world, in another body. Then he had been called... but names never lasted when he woke up.

His eyes showed him an ancient, thickly entwined forest, darkened by the thick canopy. Only the clearing he now stood in was lit by sunlight, which some part of his brain whispered
(two suns)
wasn't quite normal. But already, he was adjusting to this new place, his instincts changing to match this world.

13th Century, Metz, France Used with permission from here

In Aged Chemical Keep I talked about an imaginary, post-apocalyptic future where the survivors huddle in concrete castles, fighting off other tribes that want the security they offer. But is there any place for castles in a world that has modern explosives? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes. This post should be helpful to you if you are thinking of creating a world with defensive structures with weaponry more powerful than that of traditional medieval fantasy.

First of all a disclaimer: This post is not rigorously researched. A military historian will be able to find much that is inaccurate here. But my hope is the basic ideas here will be more accurate that the preconceived notions we carry around with us, and get you started thinking along new lines.

Charlottesville Coal Tower Modified under licence from here.

After the Green Year the war was over, with uncounted dead. Hostility between nations was finished, just as the nations were, but hostility between people has survived. The remaining humans have gathered together into communities, fighting against others to live, squabbling for now precious resources - clean water, air, and food.

There are countless dangers - the atmosphere was seeded with pockets of poisonous gases that drift through unpredictably or settle into hollows invisibly. The biological weapons, now freed of any tenuous constraints they might have once had, breed and mutate, giving rise to thousands of ingenious horrors. Engineered vampires stalk the lands, obeying the loose prerogatives programmed in by biochemists years before. Vast snake-worms burrow through the churned mud, swallowing people whole. And any human you meet may be more dangerous still, toting guns, chemical grenades, and a will to live at your expense.

Brecon Beacons national park

Last summer I went on holiday with some friends, and we decided to go to Hay-on-Wye, the famous town of books. We thought it would be fun to do a Secret Santa while we were there - each of us would buy a book secretly for someone else and at the end of the day we would give them to each other. But how to choose who would buy for whom?

If you have thought about this recently, you probably will have started with just drawing names from a hat, but quickly realized the problem: What to do when someone draws their own name?

The Wild Blue Used under licence from Lady Blackbird

After looking forward to it for some time, we recently played Lady Blackbird by John Harper for the first time. In this post I don't intend to say anything about Lady Blackbird, or to review, or even to discuss how our session went - I'm just posting the write-up of what happened. The idea being that people looking for examples of how the game might go can find one here.

Our first session played in about 4 hours plus breaks. It was very action orientated. I look forward in future sessions to hopefully having more character interaction and tough choices.

Warning - it's long! Lady Blackbird starts with the crew of the Owl in the brig of the Hand of Sorrow. Read more about the starting situation here.

In February I posted about FreeIndieGam.es, a firehose of free games - the good, the weird, and the ugly. In this post we look at feeding pirates to pelicans, pac-man meets bomberman, crazy text adventures, and explorations along a magic line.

Demänová cave of freedom, "Emerald Lake" This image used under license from here.

In the some parts of the world there are no rivers. The rain falls on the soft ground and seeps downwards, exploring and carving out deep places in the dark - caverns, sink-holes, underground lakes and rivers. In one such region, as the water eats away at the rock, it absorbs a glowing mineral. Luminescent fingers of rock grow downwards from the roofs of caves to meet others inching their way up from the floor.

A faintly pearlescent world of shadowy caves beneath the farms and houses.

Used under license from Wikimedia Commons

Various tabletop RPG systems use dice pools to resolve conflicts. Particularly, for some the mechanic is

1. Roll X dice
2. Count the number of successes (where a "success" is a roll over some number, generally fixed for the game system)
3. You win if the number of successes is greater than some target number

Now, that may or may not be a good system. Either way, it's not a system that I could look at and intuitively grasp my chance of success. For example, in Lady Blackbird, you roll d6s and a success is on a 4, 5, or 6 (so a one in two chance). So if I need 3 successes, how many dice should I roll? Not at all obvious.

For the mathematically inclined, it is, of course, a binomial distribution with p = 0.5. To help me understand it, I wrote a little javascript application. It will also hopefully be helpful if you need to look something up, either mid-design, or mid-play.

FreeIndieGam.es is a website that posts many games from around the web. Particularly, they are games that the owners of the site find interesting. Many of them explore topics that haven't been covered by games before, others have interesting designs.

Out of the dozens I have played over the last fortnight, here are three that I particularly enjoyed.

Imagine a multi-verse in which there are worlds / planes / places are linked by one-directional gateways. Anything can go through them in one direction, but nothing the other way. These gates and places form a graph that is acyclic - if you go from A to B, there is never a way of getting from B to A.

Last Exile screenshot, copyright Gonzo

Here's an idea for a game I've had for a while. It started partly with me wondering whether I could find a different take on a specialized, party-based system. Many MMOs have the standard roles of healer, tank, dps, and so on. Equally, there are some party-based shooters - Team Fortress springs most strongly to mind. What else could we have?

It also started with me thinking about the anime Last Exile, in which ponderous airships do battle in a fog shrouded sky.