I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.
But to do that I needed a starting place.
In the last year I've put out a couple of light games, like Drakken and Dragonette, I've nearly completed my complete edition of Deathtrap Lite, and have a couple of other rules light games in the works in my spare time. I haven't spent nearly as much time as I would have liked on reviews. I have a backlog of books I've read, or have almost finished readings, but haven't had much of an opportunity to review.
The ebb and flow of the 'blog has definitely reflected the good and bad times in my life. In the past year and a bit, I have partially lost use of my hands, feet, and lips, and developed chronic fatigue due to a brain injury, I've been forced to move once, and nearly had to do so a second time. I've lost 28 lbs. I've tried to go back to work, and found myself too ill to do so effectively. I've learned a new skillset, and I'm starting a business.
Inspired by a video from Questing Beast, I made one of my rubrics "Can I still play The Keep on the Borderlands with this?" If the answer became"No." I adjusted until it could.
The whole point of the exercise was to make a game that was built on a particular mechanic, just to see if I could: a player-facing one based on an evolution of the Taps & Tankards simple skill system and Stephen Smith's World of Weirth adjustments to it, but what would be the point if my readers, who are mostly an OSR crowd couldn't use it, after all?
I also was curious to see if there is a market for OSR-comaptibke non-D&D games.
I'm going to spend the next few articles talking about Deathtrap Lite. This little OSR game was my personal passion project in 2021.
When we started the World of Weirth campaign, Stephen Smith was looking for a scalable skill system that would allow him to determine the outcome of events without relying on the somewhat "pro-PC" skewed skill system of Low Fantasy Gaming. He adopted a fairly straightforward system from the old blog Taps and Tankard. He adjusted the difficulty levels inherent to that system and added a system for skills to grow as the PCS use them, rather than as they levelled up.
In practice, however, we found that the players were avoiding tasks that would require rolling using the system if they could. My fellow players found that there was some lack of clarity in the rules. Stephen invited me to write a proposal as how I would rewrite and rejig the system so that the players would be more comfortable using it, which I did in a matter of a few hours. But that got me thinking about how I could build a whole role-playing game system out of it...
This is where Deathtrap Lite came from, tweaking an existing skill system into something new and flexible. I'm going to go over the basics of the system with you here.
Starting Friday, Nov. 24th, 2023 my dark OSR fantasy game Deathtrap Lite will be on sale for $0.99 USD on DriveThruRPG. The sale will last until Monday the 27th.
And I am going to start this review by saying how much I appreciate my readers. You have kept me excited to sit down and write every single day.
What I put out last week was perfectly playable. In fact, I've gotten some good reviews and a lot of great feedback from people on it. But, it is far from something I'm satisfied with. Since it's initial release I've created an alphabetical index and a table of contents.
Random encounter and wandering monster tables are underused; not only from a mechanical standpoint, as thy have fallen out of favor in modern play and so their power to build tension has been lost, but from a world-building angle as well. A good encounter table is capable of providing hooks and lore by showing, not telling.
I want to provide an example from my daily blog for the Dungeon23 challenge: Into the Devouring Wilderness. This is a area that runs down the center of the hex crawl I am building,
Listen, I know you are really curious about who or what is lighting the torches in this dungeon. I was once, too. Unfortunately for me, I got an answer.
The Inkandi are not spoken of and better not seen. Just be sure to mark your gratitude in the ashes when you pass, and don't look too deeply into the shadows. Those who insist on noticing them and meeting their gaze are taken away to the hidden pocket worlds in which they nest. Such people are fed toxins and left as bait for the grues they war with in the gloom.
And make no mistake, if there are torches lit with no sign of who lit them, there are grues about, too.
I have started my Hex23 content a little ahead of 2023 to give myself some wiggle room later, and get the biggest, most complicated entries out of the way before the holidays.
You can catch all this cool new Deathtrap Lite content on my new secondary blog Into the Devouring Wilderness.
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| "Undercroft Entry of Burg Drachenfels", CC-BY-SA Haselburg-müller |
The premise is simple: create one dungeon room a day every day in 2023 , and in the end he will have a sprawling 365-room mega dungeon.
I liked the challenge, as did my buddies from the Weirth campaign.
While we were chatting about it, I proposed a modified version of it that would appeal to me personally:
Consider each a love letter of sorts to someone I admire in indie gaming or pop culture.
I was hoping, as good communicators do, to rephrase it to see if I understand it, and then build on it.
So, the core idea that started Travis rolling was the tendency of role-playing hobbyists to call the rule sets that they tend to use "systems." But, if you consider what a system is, the game rules alone simply don't fit the definition. After all, the rule set is only an engine under which a lot of other things that go into the game runs on. And, if you consider how things are played in the Free Kriegspiel Revolution, then the rules may be almost unnecessary to role play.
In the FKR, they say that you play the world, not the system. Whenever possible, players or the referee or both consider what makes logical sense given the fact established in play or the development sessions that built the world in the first place.
If, for example, you've established that the elves draw heavily on the darker aspect of Celtic lore as I have done in Xen, they will require blessed weapons, black Iron weapons, or possibly magic to kill them. In any other scenario, an elf might be overpowered and captured by a significantly more powerful opponent, but can only be completely removed from the story through a very narrow scope of means. That means when an elf meets a knight on the battlefield, or a giant, the results need to be interpreted in that context, never mind the rules. In an FKR game, it would probably be established at the knight would die a valiant death trying to take on an Elven swordsman, while the elf might end up trussed up for a century of torment before breaking free from a Giant's captivity unless rescued later.
Those facts are every bit as important to the game as how an attack roll is resolved. They are just as much a part of the system.
This is no mean task. I write my PDFs in Google Docs and do at least the minimum of layout as I work so that things fit in the spread. I suspect by Google Docs standards, I am doing élite Lev work.
But there is the rub... It is still Google Docs, which creates flawed .PDFs at the best of times. It downgrades image resolution, and is fiddly between devices.
At the end of the day, I am going to have to learn Scribus, I suspect. But I have ordered copies of Strange Ways and Deathtrap Lite to see if I can get an acceptable quality as is from Google Docs
I will let you all know how that turned out.
It does mean that if you have either of those books, an u
In the meantime, I have started my third attempt at teaching myself Sctibus, in hopes of doing three or four pages a day as I go.
So far, just recreating the cover and inner cover rules summary has been a hassle. If anyone can point me to good Scribus resources, please do!
So now that it is out into the world, I want to tell you all a bit more about the creation of Deathtrap Lite.
When I created the game, it was a sudden brainstorm. I was tinkering with the 7-UP system Stephen Smith had created for his World of Weirth setting. At the time we had been playing the campaign for a year, as an add-on to Low Fantasy Gaming. The idea was to have a skill system that was robust, freeform, and that could allow a character to develop organically outside of the leveling system.
It was a good system, but it had a few bugs.
We'd agreed that the system needed an overhaul, because my fellow players were cautious about using it in many circumstances. The probabilities it produced were less favorable than ability checks, and we were often confused about when it would be used.
While I was writing up my recommended tweaks, I saw that I could build a whole role-playing game system out of the engine without too much difficulty. It just needed even more tweaking... (I wonder how many man-made horrors started with this line of thought.)
I began doodling up a rules-light system with a single unified mechanic based on Stephen's 7-Up system, and renamed it "Over Six" after it started to deviate quite a bit from source. It was like a compulsion. I couldn't stop tinkering with this engine, and at the end of a week and a half of scribbling in my spare time, I had a complete game system written.
By the end of the second week, I had a game that was compatible with almost all OSR adventure modules, monsters, and spells, but was mechanically distinct.
But, why on Earth would you want to play it?
This represents nearly two years of play testing and tinkering with the system. I designed it to be plug and play. Sometimes I use parts sometimes I use the whole system. And I have thankfully had Stephen Smith use it to fill in the gaps in his own 7-UP system.
So, here's how it works:
Deathtrap Lite is cobble together from some of my favorite elements of the osr games I have reviewed over the last few years.
Everything is handled by a simple, straightforward mechanic. Whenever you need to make a determination for a character action where the outcome is uncertain and as a big impact on the narrative you roll a task check.
Tasks are an open list of skills. There is no one definitive long list of tasks your character might perform. Their descriptions are open-ended, and so, if there is a task in which your character has experience on the character sheet, you can advocate to make that the one you use.
You roll a die based on how experienced you are with that particular task, and add in a few modifiers, such as bonuses for high ability scores and penalties for low ones, bonuses for excellent quality gear or penalties for not having the right gear, etc. The goal is to roll a number over 6.. Thus the name Over Six Engine.
Two years of W2tDT already?! Wow, the time has really flown! I am still enjoying this passion project of mine.
I built a database of helpful OSR rules I call the Deathtrap Rules Cyclopedia that is updated very sporadically.
This is a series that is definitely not safe for work. However, I use it to share tips and observations on solo gaming, campaign design, and DMing as I go.
I have built three campaign worlds with detailed primer documents and discussed them as part of a series on world-building
The setting is has incredibly detailed religions and pantheons in order to create a world and captures the transition between Paganism and Christianity in Europe and the transition between the middle ages and the early modern period at the same time. I use it for my home game.
Xen uses a lightly tweaked version of Swords & Wizardry, with elements from my Oversix System. It is focused on diagetical ("rulings over rules") play over heavy use of dice.
Also designed with Swords & Wizardry in mind, The Golden Heresy draws heavily on D&D3.5e psionics, Planescape, and Gamma World.
I have moved away from pamphlet adventures to longer format adventures.
In my last article, I detailed how looking at the artwork of Yoshitaka Amano inspired me to create a world called Xen. In it's original inception, this was going to be a world designed for games played less than 2 hours at a time that drew on some of the weirder fusions of Science Fiction and Fantasy that appear in the best of Appendix-N lit.
I wanted the strange sci-fi technology of Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom, the complex and mystical politics of Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, the psychedelic fantasy qualities of Abraham Merritt's Ship of Ishtar and The Face in the Abyss. I wanted the strange and highly pervasive magic of Jack Vance's Dying Earth.
And for good measure, I thought it might be fun to add in some of the Gain mysticism and high concepts of peak Final Fantasy.
The more I created this world, the more I fell in love with it.
I had been building Aldrune with the idea that it might be a world I can spend quite a few campaigns in. Generally speaking, I make a new world every campaign or two because I always want to try new things. The only exception was a world called Astraea, which I ran five campaigns in back in the mid-naughties. Intentionally building a world that I feel like I could stay with for a while felt like it would be a great way to help grow my abilities as a Dungeon Master.
And here was Xen. A high-concept weird kluge designed for play in short bursts after the kids have been put in bed and my wife had finished your planning for the next day. I'd made it weird, because that way I could toss whatever oddball sword and planet trope I wanted to into it and it wouldn't feel too out of place.
It was as alien to the idea of the high chivalric fiction I wanted as I developed Aldrune as you could imagine. And it was something I wanted to play suddenly far more.
And so, I decided to develop Xen further and produce a document like Aldrune's. Something that has details about where the classes fit into the campaign world, what races are available, appropriate house rules, and enough lore to work.
In 2022 I have a lot I want to do.
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| Cover to D12 Monthly Issue#7 Art by Dean Spencer |
This is my last review in my rapid-fire sequence of review of D12 Monthly. I am all caught up at last! I want to boost creations like D12 Monthly whenever I can with this platform. Cool passion projects by hobbyist designers like me.
I'm always looking for more like it.
You can read my reviews of the previous issues you can find them here: zero, one, two, three, four, five, and six.
Issue #7 is devoted to outdoor exploration. It offers articles on slot-based encumberance, timekeeping in Overland travel, and solid GM procedures for handling them, advice on best practices in designing random encounter tables, and rules for camping that gives the PCs something important and beneficialto do.
The regular Weapon Spotlight gives a cool perspective on spears. Location! Location! Location! Gives us a strange, wondrous location in the form of a set of menhirs with magical secrets and a dungeon underneath, and the Personalities article details the culture of the Barbarian tribes in a region that is built up over the course of the examples in many of the articles.
While there are a few slip-ups where mechanics that only apply to later editions of Dungeons & Dragons are used, in general this issue of D12 monthly is one of the best thus far at creating a totally addition agnostic set of tools.
