Welcome to the Deathtrap Year 2 in Review

 Two years of W2tDT already?! Wow, the time has really flown! I am still enjoying this passion project of mine.

Big Projects

The Cyclopedia

I built a database of helpful OSR rules I call the Deathtrap Rules Cyclopedia that is updated very sporadically.

Crawling the Purple Isles

In the autumn of 2021, I started a project inspired by Tale of the Manticore: I am running a solo game of BECMI D&D with a few mods from The Dozen Dooms set in The Islands of the Purple-Haunted Putrescence. I've been blogging lurid, pulpy fiction based on it on another blog. I call it Crawling the Purple Isles.

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.

Campaign Worlds

I have built three campaign worlds with detailed primer documents and discussed them as part of a series on world-building 

The Aldrune setting is designed for Medieval Romance and is set by default to use Castles & Crusades, although any AD&D or expanded OD&D system will work with practically no conversion.  I may yet try transitioning to Lion & Dragon one I finally get my hands on its corebook.

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 is more of a surreal sword and sorcery setting with a lot of Science Fiction accents. I am currently running two parallel campaigns in it using strict time tracking and I'm considering trying to run using actual one-to-one time. I'm also currently recruiting for a third campaign run in parallel to the other two. Xen draws heavily on Barsoom, the Dying Earth and Final Fantasy.

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.

The Golden Heresy is a setting I started as a doodle here on the blog. It is a sword-and-planet setting where a legion of plane-hopping spies break into fantasy worlds and destroy the barriers of reality so that their master and his legions can invade with heavily-armed starcraft and slay the local gods to free the people from the lies of false deities. It is a setting built with hopping multiple worlds in mind.

Also designed with Swords & Wizardry in mind, The Golden Heresy draws heavily on D&D3.5e psionics, Planescape, and Gamma World.

Adventures

I have moved away from pamphlet adventures to longer format adventures.

In the Summer, I released Maze of the Screaming Heads: a metaphor for RPG Twitter, the PCs must navigate a maze of samey chambers where it is easy to get lost while insane undead heads shout, scream, and rave at each other, threatening to drive the characters violently insane. Escape requires facing a blob if toxic sludge, sifting truth from fiction in the heads' ravings, or making a deal with a demon price.

More recently, I participated in the OSR Supplement Jam on Itch.io, where I released The Queen of Decay for Low Fantasy Gaming using the custom ruleset for Stephen Smith's World of Wierth setting. Based on a discussion of the bizarre cover for The Princess Bride by Ted CoConis, it is a psychedelic adventure across a hallucinogenic swamp to save a princess for she is driven insane by a Necromancer that is forcing her to read the dreams of undead cultists.

Strange Ways

 I have kept myself very busy this week! Once I finished work on The Queen of Decay, I decided to create another project. Namely, I decided to grab all the classes with I have created over the past few years that added their own twist on the magic system for Dungeons & Dragons and gave them a serious overhaul, and bound them in a single PDF entitled Strange Ways.

 My created classes have been all over the map in terms of how they are presented. They have been done for different systems, written using different conventions, and often created to work only on the context of a given game. 

I decided to change that first. Each class has been rejiggered to work with TSR era systems and retroclones without any serious messing around. They use familiar tables and designs:

In some cases this alone required some heavy editing in some places, but worth it. So long as you are dealing with a system grounded in TSR Dungeons & Dragons this should be pretty easy to adapt.

What Needs to Be in Your World Building Document?

This is yet another part of my world-building series, which started with What is World-Building? and I am going to reference three worlds that I have shared here.

The Gorzeh Badlands

Aldrune

The Golden Heresy

I have prepared (most of) a campaign reference document for each, all of which are radically different from one another. And they are so different because I'm looking to create different experiences with different groups with different expectations and needs. 

For the purposes of this article, I am going to talk about three stages of campaign development for each:

• The Campaign Goal: this is where I talk about the experience you want to offer your players. Gathering inspiration,  etc.

• Player Data: after you know what kind of experience you want to offer, the next step is to figure out what you need to tell your players about the world to get them making characters, giving you ideas to work with, and building excitement.

• DM Data: Once you have your players making characters, asking questions, and possibly "front-loading" campaign material for you, you need to figure out what else you as the GM need to know to run the first couple of adventures.

Ultimately, some of your most important world building has to happen after the second adventure, but that is a topic for later.

The Golden Heresy Sword & Planet Campaign Document

Cover to Warlord of Mars #2
Art by Joe Jusko
2014 Dynamite Entertainment

Late in 2020 I started it a world-building project as part of this blog called The Golden Heresy. Inspired by a mix of Stargate SG-1, the music of Gloryhammer, the movie Wizards, and a cocktail of Jack Vance and Edgar Rice Burroughs, it was a campaign in which at least the starting party would begin as a set of interdimensional saboteurs in the service of a wizard who was trying to murder the gods.

I started out with the concept of a powerful Chaotic magician commanding a navy of interdimensional ships sending saboteurs to a post-apocalyptic world called Rustidium in order to infiltrate a world protected by angels and gods of Law, and then work undercover to sabotage a magical artifact keeping the forces of Chaos from descending upon the world and destroying its gods.

There was a pretty good chance that the characters might get lost or lose their method of inter-dimensional travel before they found the portal on Rustidium, at which point the campaign would have turned into a survival adventure across a radioactive wasteland to find a science outpost of their armada. If they found the portal, then it would become a traditional medieval fantasy with a twist has the player characters are out to destroy the world.

I figured that eventually, if the latter happened, the party would eventually have turnover enough that instead of being agents of Chaos trying to destroy the world, they would become natives to the world trying to repel the invasion they have learned about from the their dead allies.

Game System Hacking 101: pt.2

Image by FunkyFocus from Pixabay

This is part of my series on tweaking and modifying the rules of a TTRPG, or stealing and hacking in the rules of a another TTRPG into the one you want to play, in order to let you build the experience that you want. In the previous article I discussed why you might want to modify a system, how to create a rubric to determine what is a desirable mod, and how to figure out where the system can be made to better suit your aims. 

In this article I am going to show you how to get your hands dirty and actually alter rules in a smart, methodical way.  To do this, you should have a working understanding of the rule system you are using. And have an idea of how it plays. 

What Should I Hack?

Assessing Rules

If you have done the first few steps, you should have an idea of where your system of choice doesn't quite support your desired experience. Knowing roughly where the problem areas are is the key to choosing what to hack. The next step is to have a look at specific rules and looking at which ones could be changed to build a better experience.

For example, I decided, when planning my OSE game The Golden Heresy, that the binary setup that Old School Essentials through hit points didn't serve my purpose. Characters who are either ready to rock (at any hp total other than 0) or dead, just don't serve my aims. I want combat to leave a mark on a character. So this is a prime rule to alter or expand.

I also noted that the OSE's NPC reaction table doesn't really create a space for treachery and double-dealing in the way I like. It might be a hack worth considering as well.

The Golden Heresy: Known Threats of Rustidium

Rustidium

World 937, nicknamed "Rustidium" by the Celestial Cartography Guild is an example of a world where industrialization went horribly wrong. At some point a mix of tainted magic, pollution, and disease pushed the dominant civilizations into a resource rush, and then into global war. Biological, chemical, necromantic, druidic, robotic, and eventually "dirty" atomic warfare between Superpowers led to a massive collapse of several nations. Full-out atomic war followed, leaving a planet incapable of sustaining civilization at all.

Tainted by wild magic, roaming undead, lingering disease, and radiation, Rustidium would be the list of Forbidden Planets, but the Guild, at the urging of the Chaos Wizards has kept an observation station over the planet to let the world serve as an exemplar as to why certain technologies and magics are forbidden, even to the Godless.

Accordingly, many of its most significant threats are catalogue by the CCG to assess dangers to forays both on Rustidium and similar worlds.

Old School Essentials Setting: The Golden Heresy

I originally posted this as an unlisted page, as it was just a doodle, but I decided to repost it and share with all my readers, as I would like to further develop the setting where it can be tagged. 

Prelude

Valthane Torion of the Cosmic Dreadnought Amber has a simple task; hunt down the last echoes of the Urzav Heresy; ancient magical machine intelligences that bend lesser material planes to the design of the Cast-off God. They shape whole worlds, life and all to a paradigm inimical to the Chaos Wizards. 

Such polluted worlds are hard to get into, harder still to survive. No army can be brought to eliminate the heretical neo-Gods, the Fae, or the Paladins spawned by an Urzav Engine so long as the Engine itself functions well enough to keep directing probability.

And so it was with the reality he had been probing from the edge of the Vortex. The Engine there was weak. Fading. He could have stood by until it collapsed, but by the Demiurge, that was not his way. For every year he waited, new "Chosen Ones" and blessed knights, new ascended goddesses, new weaponized prophecies will arm the world against The Great Liberation, and the reign of the Wizards. More bloodshed, more mothers crying. More corpses cast into the Reactors...

He would have that Engine shut down and soon.

His Scyre had found a way. A burrowing link through realities that made little sense. This new world was accessible by way of an unstable region of World 937: Rustidium. A burnt-out atomic wasteland of mutants and dinosaurs.

From there, if a small team of spies could make it by way of the link, then they could enter into this heretics planet and destroy the Engine.

"Theryx," he addressed his docent. "Get a car, and some weapons. A cybernetic Lesser Chaote. I am going to equip a team."

As the twenty-eyed shadow bowed to obey, he placed his hands on the Scyre and put a call into the Vortex.