What I'm Up To

 I'm sure it has been missed by no one that I have been having trouble finding time for this blog. And it's anniversary has just rolled past. So I wanted to take some time to let you know what has been keeping me busy, as it is mostly RPG-adjacent.

Gaming!

Death in Space

I'm coming up on one year of an intense campaign in Death in Space. My players have managed to survive long enough to salvage a handful of functional ships, hired a crew of salvage and mining experts and built a network of laser communication satellites; they are trying to become a force for hope in the Tenebris system.

The game started as a one-shot pallette cleanser, and just kept going. So I didn't start posting play reports until it is too late.

The Weirth Campaign 

I've also been participating in a long-running campaign run by Stephen Smith that attempts to reconstruct the early 1970s Wargaming D&D experience. We've shifted systems a couple of times, including playing awhile using the 1973 D&D play test rules that were recreated in The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, fueled with and eventually replaced by Blueholme, and after a few years shifting to a highly home-brewed iteration of Tales of Argosa.

This game uses domain rules that start for fighters at level 2, one-to-one time, patron players, mass combat played in Chainmail and other retro wargames, and a ton of classic modules including the aforementioned Tonisborg, The Tower of Xenopus, Keep on the Borderlands, The Isle of Dread, Temple of Elemental Evil, Empire of the East, Mask of Nyarlathotep, Into the Depths of the Earth, Veins of the Earth, Please Go to Sleep Arthur Cobblesworth, Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Against the Cult of the Reptile God among others.

Home Game

My home game with family has had a couple of false starts, but I just brought a satisfying end to a DCC RPG campaign and am setting up a game in AD&D.

I've also been playing a solo game in Grok?! 2e, amplified by Mythic Game Master Emulator.

Summer Game

Every year in the Summer I try to run six sessions of a classic OSR game with family, friends, and my favorite D&D people. This year I am vacillating between PARANOIA SP1 or running Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands in Swords & Wizardry.

Podcasting 

Two years ago, I founded an audio production company, Stormhead Productions, with terrible timing. The Descript AI changed audio production overnight about the same time I started my business. I was putting up a freelance profile on Upwork the exact same time that the going rate for that work were cut in half and the available jobs shrank by two thirds.

Zine Review: Black Pudding: Heavy Helping Vol. 2

Author: James V. West & Various Contributors

Publisher: Random Order Creations

System: Labyrinth Lord, OSR Compatible

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG 

 I have been looking forward to reading, using, and reviewing Black Pudding Heavy Helping vol. 2 for a very long time. That I somehow missed its publication is mark of shame upon my standing as an OSR nerd. Especially as Black Pudding: Heavy Helping Vol. 1 was everything I loved about the Old School Renaissance in one place. And doubly so as Heavy Helping vol. 2 is more of the same only better.

Black Pudding HHv2 is the collected material from issues 5-8 of James V. West's Black Pudding Zine  rearranged for easy navigation. BPHHv2 includes character sheets, character  classes, magic items, NPC hirelings and villains, monsters, adventures, a pantheon of gods, a sizable campaign setting, and a set of house rules that can be used in almost any OSR system. 

The mechanics are mostly written with Labyrinth Lord in mind, with occasional references as well to Swords & Wizardry and DCC RPG. As usual, conversion is pretty easy with the exception of the problem that Black Pudding assumes race as class as the default. Even then, extracting the racial traits from the class traits in order to convert racial classes into PC races is incredibly easy.

And as before, the art, tone, and ideas presented in Black Pudding are my kind of off-the-wall gonzo, comic-bookish, and very Punk.

What I Loved

Character Sheets

I first learned about James v West's work through his character sheets, which are frequently circulated around the internet. His intense, cartoony, Payo-influenced work really spoke to me. Whenever I play games with my family I print off some of his wild and wonderful character sheets.

Art

And the Art really does deserve some additional attention: I love James West's art style. It draws a lot from 80s skate-punk aesthetic mixed with French comics and cartoons. It is frenetic, weird, and unique. And it appears on pretty much every page of the 'zines. I don't think there is a bad piece anywhere in the book. It is brimming with chainmail bikinis, muscle-bound barbarians, eyeball monsters, serpents, slime, and cool swords.

Classes

BPHHv2 has a sizable collection of classes designed to be played in a B/X based OSR game.

Alien: a strange martian with the ability to cause potion effects with their mysterious psychic powers. 

Beastfriend: hey character with a supernatural ability to call, calm, and befriend creatures in Wild places. 

Boola: a feminine being who raises, nurtures, and is in turn protected by monsters. 

Death Witch: A Very metal magic user with reduced spellcasting ability and a chance to die every time they learn a new spell. However, they have the ability to speak to the dead and undead, command the undead like an evil cleric, and place a curse on beings that deals damage equal to their current hit points. I also have a chance of coming back from the dead every time they are killed. 

Demodyn: a tiny minor demon with the ability to conjure and manipulate fire, and who exudes a corrupting aura. 

Eyeball: a giant eyeball with arms and legs that has thief abilities and sharp perception but can be blinded by bright lights. 

The fat lady: a heavily armored female opera singer who can enhance her strength, boost her allies, or deaf and her enemies with the power of her voice. 

Feral Knight: a penitent night who has given up armor and weapons after becoming a hermit to repent for some misdeed. As the character advances they gain some clerical and paladin-like abilities, and slowly regain their ability to use the armor and weapons they shed when they became a hermit. 

Fighting wombat: a tough anthropomorphic wombat who has a higher Armor class from behind and the ability to dig at High speeds. 

Flamer: a pyrokinetic character that takes its inspiration from Johnny blaze/the Human torch of the fantastic four. 

Goon Royale: a shaggy humanoid thug with a razor sharp bite that can latch on to his foes and keep gnawing and who climbs like a thief.

Iggy: Iggy pop as a D&D class: a hyperactive bare-knuckle-brawling, shirtless lunatic that never sleeps, is almost never surprised, and gains bonuses when doing things that are stupidly dangerous.

Ninja: a slow-leveling variant of a thief with the ability to use smoke bombs, a high chance of surprising enemies, enhanced ranged attack abilities, and a chance of instant death blows on a backstab.

Norg: A lesser giant with resistance to cold and the ability to communicate with polar bears.

Orbii: tiny, round smurf-like creatures who were once created by a moon goddess to protect her daughters, their holy purpose is long concluded. At first level they get one ability such as a single spell-like power or thief skill. Once per day they can pray for the moon goddess to show her affection and gain a random blessing.

Rat Bastard: a thieving lesser were-rat.

We've already included some Orbii and Death Witches in home games to a lot of laughs. They do a great job of classy setting design to create an off-the-wall gonzo D&D world. 

NPCs 

Like the previous Black Pudding: Heavy Helping collection, this volume includes a section called "Meatsheilds of the Bleeding Ox" with a collection of 33 potential hirelings or henchmen using the classes and abilities published in Black Pudding. A few of these NPCs use classes from the previous volume and may be difficult to use if you don't have the other volume.

This isn't just a showcase of characters that use the new classes, it also includes a few standard OSR-compatible NPCs from classic B/X classes and some truly unique and quirky NPCs, like a damaged alien robot and a haggard level-0 commoner who has an infestation of invisible imps tasked with protecting him no matter what.

The characters here are strange, quirky, and fun. The way they are presented with "turn-ons", "turn-offs" and a 1-3 sentence backstory gives you a lot of material for characterizing them. I've already included several of them in a home campaign.

Magic Items 

BPHHv2 includes 3 unique spellbooks with unusual spells and rituals built around a unique theme and NPC wizard that creates a lot of flavor for the purposes of magic. It also includes 14 named unique magical weapons that are replete with bizarre powers, fun backstories, and an excessive number of puns. They are a prime example of how a magic item can be used to create incredible depth to your game.

Adventures

BPHHv2 has a selection of location-based adventures in a variety of formats including:

• a full-sized dungeon: "The Rat-Queen Dies Tonight" 
• a five-room dungeon style game: "Ghilki's Hole"
• a one-page dungeon: "Climb the Ice Stairs to Discover your Fate" 
• A detailed and well-designed single encounters: "A Trolling We Will go" 
• and an outdoor hex crawl: "The Standing Stones of Marigold Hill" 

All of which have tie-ins to material (classes, monsters, or magic items) presented elsewhere in the compendium, and have the uniquely manic, comic-book energy that makes Black Pudding unique. You can see the full range of popular adventure structures common in the OSR all in one place.

Settings

Beyond the single adventures, BPHHv2 includes a pair of extremely large evironments that are better thought of as campaign settings filled with smaller adventure sites.

"Underground Down Below" is a massive underdark "mapcrawl" style adventure that reminds me a lot of "Into the Depths of the Earth", a labyrinth with numerous small caverns and wondrous locations that have their own factions and ways of interacting to make it dynamic.

"Adventures in the North" is a massive hex-crawl in a barbaric frozen frostfell style environment complete with encounter tables, unique monsters, settlements with complex NPCs, rumor tables, and a handful of faction conflicts. It is bare-bones because of limited space, but would be more than enough to start a campaign and keep it rolling until the mid-levels.

It also has a Black Pudding Gazetteer detailing a world that fits the wild, gonzo material in the magazine thus far. The world of Yria is presented in a large world map with various regions given 1-2 paragraph details, while major city-states are given their own page with a number of random tables with encounters, sights, sound, and weather designed to do a lot of heavy lifting on world building.

Yria also has a fairly sizable pantheon of a dozen gods and a mythos that describes how the interrelate and how the gods relate to the world and each other, along with a creation myth in brief.

Random Tables and Rules Hacks

I love the random tables in Black Pudding; they are often very case specific, odd, and many of them would rarely be useful except for brainstorming, but they are great for mining for inspiration in much the same way Jason Sholtis' The Dungeon Dozen books are.

Tables with titles like "The goblin touched your stuff and now it...", "Then a robot walks in...", "The Wizard is Pissed Of and You are a Target of...", "Overheard Drunken Conversations", or "The PCs Run Across an Island of Hot Amazons..." can lighten up even the most taxing prep session and immediately lighten the tone of any adventure design.

Layout

The Black Pudding zine is hand-drawn and hand written with frenetic energy and fun art. It may not always be the best organized, but every page is fun to look at and brimming with creativity.

Growth Points 

I want a Tank in D&D Now...

One of the villains presented in the bestiary in Black Pudding Heavy Helping volume 2 is Zasto Fillistan, a viscious, ill-tempered wizard with an appetite for destruction, and a wide range of strange objects stolen from other planes of reality. Among his extraplanar curiosities is a "Wand of rapid fire" (an assault rifle) and "Shar-Man, the Rolling Fortress" (a Sherman tank enchanted to burn wine for fuel). While Earthly objects are far from unusual in D&D, that one is a pretty wild choice; and I know for a fact that my players would stop at nothing to get their hands on it, and woe betide the foolish GM who lets it fall into a PC's hands. But seeing it has made me desperately and irrationally want to include tank warfare in my current DCC campaign. 

Reliant on Content from BPHHv1

Okay, now for a serious complaint. There is a lot of material here that refers back to material in earlier issues of Black Budding. You will not be able to use about 10% of the book without either earlier volumes of Black Pudding or a copy of Black Pudding Heavy Helping volume 1. This is to be expected when you are buying a compendium of magazines, so I suppose it is to be expected, but it is something that one should be aware of before buying, and is worth mentioning on the sales page.

Consistency

Black Pudding does not really stick to one set of conventions for OSR gaming. Some classes and monsters are clearly built for Swords & Wizardry, others for Labyrinth Lord or Old School Essentials, and yet others include elements for DCC RPG or OSRIC. With a 'zine that is definitely a raw, creative endeavor I am not really surprised that it includes material that is for whatever takes the contributor at the moment, but I would love for it to be a tiny bit more consistent so that there is less conversion work to do.

Definitely Not for Serious Campaigns 

While some of the magic items and monsters could be dropped into a campaign world, Black Pudding in general is focused on weird, gonzo, and decidedly silly game play. Add almost anything from it is going to definitely make you game sillier. That's not a bad thing, but it is something that people need to be aware of.

The Underdark Map

The map for "Underground Down Below" is really dense and can be hard to read. It desperately needs to be put on a two-page spread to make it easier to process. There's just too much going on to be contained on one page and still be easily interpreted.

Nothing for Gozr?

Black Pudding's early issues had a myriad of rules hacks and suggestions that accumulated in a very tightly-presented "Black Pudding RPG", a light, fast-playing B/XD&D based game. Eventually this was separately published by James V. West as GOZR. I am truly surprised we hear practically nothing about GOZR anywhere in BPHHv2 at all, it seems like it would make a lot of sense to point players to GOZR for reference to material that had also appeared in early issues of Black Pudding, and it seems like a lost opportunity not to draw attention to it and use Black Pudding as a platform for expanding GOZR specifically.

Conclusions 

I have come to really look forward to new installations of Black Pudding. It is  frenetic, silly, gonzo, Punk AF D&D that isn't afraid of a little edgy humor. In fact, I deeply appreciate that Black Pudding knows exactly who its audience is: it is rich with spicy humor, chainmail bikinis, naked sorceresses, and goofball 'metal references. It doesn't apologize once for being very much for 80s kids who have no time for politically correct, family friendly D&D. It is happy to say "Look, we're all adults here... adults who want to take a break and be a bit childish and a little stupid" and I love it.

Tomb of the Apellomancer

 

My oldest son recently formed his first D&D club at school. He is teaching his friends how to play using Basic Fantasy RPG. And, like all first time DMs, he is figuring out running the game for himself. To help him out, I created a mid-sized dungeon for him: the Tomb of the Apellomancer.

This is a light-hearted funhouse dungeon featuring magic and traps themed primarily around writing and paper, and includes a GM's cheat-sheet for first-time GMs. It is written with Basic Fantasy in mind, but, is compatible with any other OSR game you might want to use with minimal fuss.

It hasn't just served my son, either; my wife has recently started a D&D club for students at the school where she works, and has placed this dungeon in her campaign world. She is expecting her students to raid it in the new year. 

I have it up on itch.io as a PWYW title. Personally, I am just happy to have people playing it, and encourage you to grab it for free. 

Get it in Itch.io now! 

Solo Gaming Fiction: Bad Medicine (pt.2)

This is part 2 of a fictionalized version of my solo game of Mongoose Traveller (2022), which I wanted to share with you all.  

My Summer was Full of Games

 I realize I haven't posted on here in a hell of a long time! My Summer was a glorious mix of in-real-life and in-game adventures.

Brier Island North lighhouse,
taken from the deck of the Mega Nova

IRL I took a family roadtrip that put nearly 3,000km on the Mazda, and along the way I attended art festivals, live concerts, joyous family functions, long days on the beach, and a whale watching tour where I got to see nine individual humpback whales and a few minke whales.

I also produced a pile of episodes of my solo RPG podcast Swords Against Madness, following my heroes getting themselves in pretty deep in their gonzo sword-and-planet weirdness, played in Swords & Wizardry.

It wasn't my only solo-gaming time spent. I took a couple of days of lazy relaxing to play through a massive chunk of Jason Sholtis' Operation Unfathomable and Odious Uplands, and had an absolute blast! 

These modules are the best example of making 1st level awesome that I have ever had the pleasure to experience. I have both a review upcoming and possible a few bonus episodes of Swords Against Madness summarizing my playthrough... with all of the running and screaming involved.

500 Posts!

 I've been writing this blog for five years now, and I am proud to say I have finally hit my 500th post!

I haven't had the time I would like for it lately, but for all the right reasons:

Welcome to the Deathtrap has inspired me to write a number roleplaying games from full OSR clones, to OSR-compatible games with their own Dark Fantasy setting and mechanics, to my own unique 2d6 Weird West system, to a one-page horror game.

I also have published a number of short OSR modules, and I am working towards a full-sized campaign setting. 

W2tDT has attracted some friends who share my passion for D&D, it's history, and it's potential, allowing me to participate in many campaigns both short and long.

I have created 2 ttrpg short podcasts for friends and ongoing solo actual play podcast with over 500 regular listeners. Not to mention a complete 41-episode science fantasy audio drama inspired in part by the Gonzo gaming aesthetic I have come to love since starting the blog.

I have all of you to thank for carrying me through the lockdown, through the transitions involved with becoming a work-at-home dad, and through a life-altering central nervous system injury and learning to live with a disability.

I want to thank you all and hope that this blog will still be seeing the off update in another five years.

Making the Low Levels Awesome

 I've been running a Swords & Wizardry game at home the last few weeks that has been possibly one of the most fun, most campaigns games I have played to date.

My idea started out both simple and challenging: "What if I ran a D&D game with as much surreal, plane-travelling weirdness as there was in late-90s Magic: the Gathering. I'm talking the peak insanity of the era of Tempest, Ice Age, Urza's Destiny, and Urza's Legacy, where the game was simulating a war between insane cthulhoid cyborgs and a race of precision-bred magicians with living shards of crystal and an inter-dimensional goblin horde in the middle.

I wanted low-level PCs to be roaming the planes, dealing with truly out-there wizards, and warped magical entities. As always, I subscribe to the theory that level one should feel as awesome as level 10.

My Setup

 Swords & Wizardry played RAW, but using a cosmology based on the AD&D2e / D&D3.X era Great Wheel / Planescape planar layout.

The PCs come from a kingdom on a mostly-undetailed world I am basing mostly on a mix of H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle mixed with a bit of Lord Dunsany, then brought kinda' down-to-earth with the trippier bits of The Elder Scrolls' Tamriel.

 At the beginning of the campaign the PCs are new arrivals at Armathan, a grand castle on a high-mountian meadow. The Mountain's great workshops are powered by a waterfall and streams that run right through its undercroft. The Castle itself was built as a part of and to defend a silver mine and an important monastery. The mine in turn connected to ancient pre-human ruins. 

Broken Wings

Q: How do you make god laugh?

A: Announce your plans. 

This month has seen me go to the funeral of two beloved relatives and between them fight my way through two different stomach bugs. My great hope of making May the month I breathe life back into Welcome to the Deathtrap went completely down the drain. I am even going to have to be a week behind on episode 19 of Swords Against Madness.

I have not let my creativity slack off, however. I took the time to put my notes on the Death in Space campaign I told you about earlier in the month into a downloadable format for anyone interested

Broken Wings includes:

• A pitch for a campaign set on Amissa based on scrounging in ancient industrial ruins.
• 6 PC Origins that fit on my interpretation of Amissa
• 20 Alternate PC backgrounds for a desert planet
• 6 Alternate equipment packages for characters who live on a planet

 And rules for incorporating them into a running game of Death in Space whether it is set on Amissa or not.

Download it Here

An Atari-inspired Campaign for Traveller/ Cepheus Engine

I have been tinkering with a new campaign to play at home with friends and family inspired by my current binge of old Atari games and retro sci-fi. I wrote it specifically for Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition from Stellagama Publishing, but it should run with almost any form of Traveller with a few tweaks.

8 want something lighthearted that captures the kind of fantastical popcorn Space opera that you see in the premise of 80s SF movies like The Last Starfighter or in the manuals and comics that came with early console games.

The bad guys are vile, the good guys fly cool ships, and the stakes are very high. It is definitely not like the Third Imperium... although I decided to keep some of the best ideas of that setting.

Here's my pitch:

Cepheus: IRATA

Red Tidings at Yule, How I Finally got the Never-ready Module Out!

I wanted to mention to anyone looking for some weird fun over the Holidays that my Holiday module, Red Tidings at Yule is PWYW!

Spreading some Holiday Cheer

Back in 2020 I wrote a 0-level funnel for DCC RPG. I ran a solo play-test myself and was very happy with my results, but I was having a hell of a time creating a good map for it, and I couldn't get together a group to play it that year, much to my disappointment. I really intended it as a way to keep some friends of mine who were going to be alone for Christmas thanks to the lock-downs close in spirit if not in person.

It's a fun piece that borrows from Christmas & Yule folklore from across Europe:

• The main villains are the Kallikantzaroi, Greek Christmas goblins.
• They are teamed up with Krampus, the well-known Norse Yule demon.
• They are collaborating with Belsnickle, a grumpy Christmas figure who hands out both presents and whippings from Germany.
• They are  able to meet Knecht Ruprecht a Swiss / German figure who rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless.
• They can receive a magic item related to Morozko, a Russian fairy-tale figure often related to Christmas.
• They can rescue the Scandinavian Christmas Gnome.
• They can free Risia a pagan winter goddess from Scandinavian / Slavic myth.
• It also contains some beats from classic DCC adventures like They Serverd Brandolyn Red. 

With no chance to play it, I took my notes and wrote them up as a module, with an eye to share them the next year.

Campaign Reports and PWYW Preview of Undeadwood WWRPG

I really enjoyed creating podcasts for my players to summzarize our last play sessions and build up lore for Xen this past Spring. I've decided to do that and take it up to 11 for my current campaign Undeadwood Weird West RPG, especially as I have been building a game for scratch that has turned out to be pretty darned good.

And so, with two episodes now live online that are a mix of developer's blog, world building, and play reports, I wanted to share that podcast with you here. It will be live on major podcasting platforms over the next month or so.

Sourcebook Review: Hogwater: Village of Secrets

 

Author: Travis Miller

Publisher: Self-published

System: Swords & Wizardry

Marketplace: Lulu, Square

I'm going to start this review with full disclosure. I consider Travis Miller to be an internet friend. When I was trying to start an OSR actual play podcast a few years ago, he volunteered to play, and played three sessions of Lamentations of The Flame Princess with myself and Stephen Smith. I've also written guest articles on Grumpy Wizard, and featured guest articles from him on Welcome to the Deathtrap. Travis gave me a complimentary copy of Hogwater: VIllage of Secrets hoping that I would review it, and in the process give him the kind of feedback that people like about my articles.

I will also confess that the article I did on factions with examples from Temple of Elemental Evil last week was to set this review up.

Hogwater is a slightly different way of setting up a home base for the first phases of a campaign.

Rather than provide a map of the village off the bat, and then go place by place describing the people who live in it, Travis Miller describes the village in terms of the NPCs and factions within it. Every NPC of note is given clear motivations, preferences, quirks, and goals with the first few steps described.

What he describes is a small, unfinished keep surrounded by a young borderlands town situated on a new highway that serves as a midway point for some relatively new trading routes. It's a place where merchants pass through to resupply on their way to other places.

The hero that established hog water a generation ago has recently been usurped by the current lord of the keep, who enforces his law through a dangerously skilled marshal, and an incredibly corrupt Reeve.

Detectives in Space, Desperate Cowboys, Freezing Barbarians, Mystic Pilgrims... Or all of the Above!

Looking to start a game? I have some campaign ideas that might inspire you.

How I Pitch my Campaigns

When I am ready to start a new campaign, I put together a handful of "pitch documents" that give the players a taste of what they might expect with the game. The style of my pitch documents varies a lot by mood and inclination.

Recently my wife and I concluded a one-to-one Fabula Ultima campaign, and have been, after a couple of false starts and a few weekends where life just got in the way, looking to start something new. I recently prepared a document with four campaign pitches for a one-to-one game based on our current leanings, taste, and media intake.

As this could be a useful tool for assembling a group, I thought I would share a (slightly tidied up) PDF version of the document.

Pitches May 2024

Generally speaking, I give a fictional preview either written like a movie trailer, or a summary of precipitating events written like the back of a book cover.

Then I create a couple of paragraphs explaining the game of choice, the role the PCs might start with, and what kind of overarching experience I hope to provide.

I used to add in some evocative art hunted down on Pinterest. These days, I try generating something custom using an AI. It seems like a good, non-commercial use for the tool.

The Pitches

In this case I have a Scifi Detective Noir that is drawing a lot on Philip K. Dick, as well as an old favourite podcast, Black Jack Justice; a natural fantasy story based on a fusion of Babylon 5: Crusade, The Slayers: Try, Legend of Mana, and Sorcerer Hunters; A cowboy story that is intended to be a massive and dark expansion of my Vulture Rock wargame scenario played in Cowpunchers; and there is an AD&D scenario there inspired by the copious amount of Manowar that has been on my CD player in the last week (I'm also on my 15th play-through of Skyrim).

Feel free to steal and use these, and I am happy to answer questions, if you want more information about how I intended to use them.

But these particular campaign pitches just didn't sing. They weren't quite what we were looking for.

Trying Again

I sat for awhile trying to think of what I might try differently, and started taking the most appealing elements of each into a totally different beast.

I am currently enjoying the novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons as well. If you're not familiar, it is a dark and surreal (and much more serious) science fiction take on The Canterbury Tales which involves a group of pilgrims being sent to their deaths on an alien world, telling about their experiences on a previous voyage there. Hyperion is a pretty influential book in science fiction media, but is not itself very well known. If you have played Borderlands, Bio-Shock, Mass Effect, or Amnesia games, you have probably heard a lot of references to it.

I decided to blend my four campaigns together: a dark western story, but with a mystery focus, set in my own science fiction world, to which I would add in some heavy metal notes. And while I was at it, I decided to toss in some elements of Mass Effect and Borderlands (a fantastic Sci-Fi Western setting)

 What I ended up with is a frontier space colony world full of ancient hyper-tech ruins that can create miracles, where runaways, psychics, criminals, and cultists are rampant. I called it Adaro. 

I've written a lot about realizing a science fiction setting in the past. One thing that I find to be axiomatic is that if you are not using an established setting, you need to work a lot harder to tell your players about it. When I write science fiction pitches, I add a lot more detail to it before I pitch it.

Adaro is written as a series of three monologues from very different perspectives, and two dossiers written for a government agent, plus a couple of definitions, and I feel it does a great job of doing heavy lifting.

Steal This Planet!

Tragically, it just didn't sell to my wife as a home game setting. However, i feel like Adaro might be just the thing someone else is looking for, so I am going to toss the pitch document up here, and see if any of my readers want to steal it and make it their own.

Download it as a PDF here:

Adaro: A Mythic Space Western

Day Tripper, Analysis and Thoughts

This is part two of my discussion of my experience with the AI game master and role-playing game Day Tripper. See my previous article for a transcript of the actual play 

When I played Day Tripper, one of the first things I noticed was a slightly wonky pacing. While the game doesn't have a limited number of interactions, the AI game master is designed to really hurry things along: up to and including taking agency away from the player to desc

Let's Talk Adventures: Highfell

 I am going to experiment with a slightly more conversational tone to discuss some of the big modules out there in the OSR and beyond, rather than giving them the lengthy, structured approach I give to TTRPGs here. Partially in the name of doing more with this blog, and partially because I feel the value you get from a module depends very much on what you intend to do with it, and partially because I am, as always, here to share the things I find awesome. And you all don't always want to read 20 paragraphs.

So I am going to start this experiment with Highfell: The Drifting Dungeon.

Highfell: The Drifting Dungeon

Author: Greg Gillespie
Publisher: OSR Publishing
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG,
System: OSR Compatible

Greg Gillespie is probab;ly one of those designers who doesn't need much by way of introduction. He has a pretty good reputation in the OSR community for his massive and complex modules.

Every couple of years Greg Gillespie releases aa new module that he has been hammering away at, often daily for years. His first one, Barrowmaze, is legendary: a sprawling labyrinth of barrows in a haunted valley that is peopled by undead, strange magical monstrosities, and terrible curses. As the PCs explore this on-floor labyrinth they will find that trditional "levels" are replaced by zones that are inreasingly deadly as you push further away from the nearby town. Sattered runestones introduce a new kind of magic, and there is a history of the place that can be learned by clues.

Highfell: the Drifting Dungeon, along with Dwarrowdeep are two follow-up megadungeons. They are offered in both OSR and D&D5e versions. with the OSR versions being mostly structured along the conventions of AD&D / OSRIC, meaning you will see relatively middling stats for NPCs, high stats for the pre-gen PCs, and two-part alignments, but as always, OSR is OSR, you can convert anything for a B/X system like Old-School Essentials in a few seconds in your head as a veteran GM.

All three modules are set in a consistent world, and Dwarrowdeep and Highfell cross over with one another and have cross-over material from Barrowmaze seeded into them. As a clever manoevre, most of the towns and villages of the settin make menton of cities with familiar names like "Threshold" allowing a comfortable drop into existing D&D worlds like Mystara.

This module is pretty much a full canned campaign: you have a hometown with enough factions and intrigue to make time in  "Town" compelling play, and a pretty big cast of NPCs. A couple of smaller villages that have enough details to make them interesting, A few adventure sites, and then one immense megadungeon. Like Keep on the Borderlands or Temple of Elemental Evil there is enough material beyond the dungeon to run a whole campaign, probably for years if you want to.

The Clock-Driven Dungeon

 A couple of weeks back, I created a dungeon, a set of dwarven ruins in a volcanic chasm that I wanted to feel vast and terrifying.

In this dungeon, slow mutants (à la Stephen King's The Gunslinger) are hidden, but forever listening. Make too much noise, cast too many spells, and you will suddenly find yourself surrounded on all sides by swarms of hungry, mad, whispering things.

It is a crumbling maze full of ancient machines that will break, causing clouds of steam torrents of water or crushing debris to come down on you... With the mutants likely behind.

And it truly is a labyrinth of bridges, tunnels balconies, and ancient smelters, It could take days to navigate.

Where cenotaphs with the last riddle of the final bitter survivor of a ln extinct clan sealed their magical secrets away from the unworthy. Only one who can read his tongue, solve his riddle, and sacrifice an object of power can uncover it.

Sound good?

Well, the hitch was that it was made for Fabula Ultima, for my wife, who loves TTRPGs, but hates old-school dungeon crawling.

Why I Don't Often Review Modules (Trying Something New)

 You know, I've built up a pretty big stock of adventure modules over the last few years. Thanks to Humble Bundle, Bundle of Holding, Itch.io jams, and that absolutely bodacious sale Jim Raggi put on last year, I probably have enough to keep me in review content for years without breaking a sweat or spending another dime.

The fact is though, I only discuss modules for the most part when they also do something interesting mechanically or culturally:

The Hill Cantons Quartet had the incredible Chaos Index tool, weird monsters and a sense of humor that made it a joy to play. It was the quartet of creations that put The Hydra Cooperative on everyone's map.

Sailors on the Starless Sea helped redefine a genre and set the unique tone of the most popular OSR game ever made.

Cha'alt and its companions have an innovative game woven into its pages, and tons of mechanics for things like mutations, capricious gods, and a totally different way of approaching magic. Not to mention being a prime example of gonzo style play.

Islands of the Purple Haunted Putrescence for its sheer scope as a hexcrawl, and willingness to toss genre an pop culture into a  lender and set it to frappé. 

Into the Demon Idol is a favorite example of a one-page dungeon.

Frostbitten & Mutilated with its dice scatter tables, clever handling of time travel, dark and twisted character classes, and serving as a prime example of the unique design principles of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. 

Hot Springs Island a massive, stylish  system-neutral hexcrawl that exemplifies setting design, and has a truly amazing way of presenting NPCs.

The Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, is a book that is beautiful and supremely imaginitive. It takes the concept of the pilgrimage and makes it into a rich and surreal experience.

Arête is a great example of mythic D&D at its best. And I used it to experiment in solo play.

DNGN Issue #1 was an interesting experiment in presentation. 

The Winds of Madness was sent to me by a reader and was an absolutely stunning romp through the Far Plane with Githyanki and Spelljammer ships that did a better job of the Spelljammer setting than WotC did. It is also a great case study in the differences between the way adventures are designed in OSR and 5e cultures.

The Abandoned Estate of Moonweaver Hall I reviewed mostly because I wanted to encourage a first-time writer who was being dogpiked by asshokes on Twitter who didn't  care for his cover. I  thought a little honest feedback might help him out and keep him from being driven out by cancel-culture asses.

Each review was there because the module was an exemplar, a talking point, or a tool for developing my ideas, as much as it was a review of the product itself. I wanted to explore something that the specific setting had to offer.

I also have played most of them. Some of them twice.

My collection, which includes around forty DCC RPG adventures, a dozen Lamentations of the Flame Princess modules, a modest collection of classic D&D adventures, a shocking number of Blue Rose books, the Alpha Blue THOT trilogy, most of the early Necrotic Gnome OSE modules, Rappan Athuk, Highfell, The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, Nevin Pendlebrook's Perilous Pantry, Warhammer Fantasy RPG 1e's Enemy Within series pretty much the entire 1st and early 2nd edition PARANOIA libraries is brimming with adventures good, bad, and extremely weird. I have a lot of thoughts I could share on almost all of them.

But I really hesitate to do so. For a simple reason:

There's just too many ways to use them.

I have run quite a few modules over the years exactly as written. Others, I have stolen the map and a few treasure hoards, or maybe I grab some useful mechanical ideas, monsters, or traps. How you use your module will make some modules more valuable than others. If you are looking for a traditional campaign to run, Hot Springs Island, The Temple of Elemental Evil (especially combined with the Giants and Underdark series) are probably the best bets. If you want to run a long game that doesn't fit that traditional mold, you might be better off considering The Ultaviolet Grasslands and Black City or Cha'alt. If you are just looking for a few good ideas to pillage, the Hill Cantons quartet is a fertile ground for plunder. If you want a very finite game that will liast seven sessions or so, A Red and Pleasant Land or The Islands of Purple Haunted Putrescence are great. Need some ideas for your PCs after they took a sip from a hag's cauldron? Grab Narcosa or Sounds of the Mushroom Kingdom. Need something you can run right now? The One Page Dungeon Compendium or almost any level-appropriate DCC module will do the job. Looking for good fodder for a solo crawl? Rappan Athuk, all the way!

I can definitely give a good factual rundown of a module's properties and major strengths and weaknesses. But I am not sure it would make for interesting reading.

Honestly, the best way to review modules is probbaly something like the best way of reviewing movies: you need to cultivate a persona that grabs one audience, and then  recommend books to that audience. Bryce Lynch over at 10ft. Pole, for example has perfected the angry, disaffected GenX DM who just wants to run the game, not spend all day planning shit. His audience are GMs who want to run something without tweaks, as written, and not spend their time or energy on something unless it has a twist.

Which isn't me. I love prep. A module has to be really special for me to want to run it "as is" out of the box. I'd do it again for Hot Springs Island or Highfell, and one day I would love to run Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City. But, on a whole, I want to plunder a  module for good ideas. 

Often I want something I can put somewhere on my sandbox after modifying it to suit my needs, like I did for Into the Demon Idol in my article on how to use one-page dungeons. This may well be my favorite way to use modules. And because of it, I suspect that adventures that would be poorly reviewed on 10ft, Pole as humdrum or underdeveloped might receieve a kinder review here. And some of the modules he finds interesting hold little appeal to me, as they are not really compatible with my style of play.

There is another issue as well:

While Modules are fun to read, collect, and plunder, I prefer to home-brew.

Modules are a frippery. You don't need them. Most of the ones I have collected, I have done so purely because I am a fan of the module, or I am curious about the module after seeing it teased out on a YouTube channel like Questing Beast. Or it is in a bundle along with a game that I really want to review.

At the end of the day, if you want to be the best GM possible, learning to plan efficiently is one of the most important skills you can hone.

But...

As I have thought long and hard on this topic lately, I find myself wondering: would my sandbox-play and rules-hacking approach be valuable if I started adding more modules to my rotation?

Or could I develop a more casual structure to share my thoughts on some of the cool modules in my collection that doesn't take me ages to write as I do when reviewing a game? It bears some experiementation...

Over the month, I am going to compose a few different styles of short article to discuss some of my favourite modules. I hope one of them might land with my readers. Please let me know when one does.

Adventure: Red Tidings at Yule

 I just posted a new Level-0 funnel themed around Christmas villains and heroes from European Christmas and Yule folklore.

You won't see Santa Claus here, but you will face Krampus and hoards of Kallikantzaroi, led by the fiendish Belsnickle.You might save the Christmas Gnome, or find out the terrible fate of Morozoko the Yuletide wizard.

All in perfectly dark, gory humour, for those who like the occasional fiendish grin with your holiday cheer.

It is on DTRPG as a PWYW Product!

This module is a labour of love, with multiple playtestings over three Christmases, and a lot of agonizing about design, and especially maps. I made use of last year's Christmas present to make new and better ones using Dungeon Alchemist that I am very happy with:

 

If you are interested, I have uploaded three of the original dungeon alchemist files for sharing: The Withered Junction, The Sap Pits and Hollow, and the Temple of Annihilation (The Kallikanzeroi village involves a lot of photoshop and perspective tricks, so is not really share-ready.)

Developing Procedural Campaign Building Tools

 Let me tell you about a ridiculous idea I have.

After running the Starfarer solo game, and through it, generating a pretty detailed science fiction world, I have worked towards making it playable for other people.

Wanting something that would let me run the game at the drop of a hat - mostly of academic curiosity - and to help me refresh my long after feed computer programming skills, I designed a program that procedurally generates  outputs star system's complete with points of interest and  rumor tables. These will soon be detailed enough to give GM's everything that need to run a game at the drop of a hat with me.

Once the data is already generated,  it is pretty easy to extracted the data from my output file, and change it, and rewrite it.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to create a set of scripts that would weekly check rumors, prune old ones, replace them with new ones, cycle through cultural events, can't even manage and imaginary market futures site, sports league, and entertainment scene.

Given a few weeks of time hocus on nothing else, I could even have a unique role-playing game built specifically for it that played like something like a strange hybrid of Star Adventurer, Stars Without Number, Mythic, and a table top interpretation of No Man's Sky or Starfinder.... Mixed with a healthy dose of Star Trek and Mass Effect.

Tinkering and Tumult

 It has been a crazy week for me, readers! My youngest son started school, and I am suddenly back on the job market and trying to figure out where my skills can best serve the world after years of being focused on my children full-time. I'm pursuing a lot of different angles as I get back into figuring out what I want to do "when I grow up."

Honestly, getting back into life coaching with focusing on making lifestyle changes to help handle chronic pain might be the best way to put the last year of difficulties to good use... but I can hardly resist the lure of going back into tech.

To that end, I have been using my role-playing creations as a touchstone to working on reviving and updating old skills and developing new ones.

Machine Learning technology has been a big part of that focus. After all, engineering a good prompt and understanding how "AI" processes language is a new, and probably very useful skill. And I have learned a lot about both generating images and content that could be useful for TTRPGs.

I am going to share a bit of my AI experimentation here, and also talk about why I have decided to ditch some of it.