Apellomancy

 I am co-writing some adventures with my son for his schoolmates in Basic Fantasy RPG. We decided to design a style of magic based on names and nicknames to play a role in the early adventures. This led to us designing five spells created by the feared Appellomancer, Ngo-Gua whose tomb the PCs will be raiding in search of a book of the True Names of evil spirits (the Numaomicon). 

I thought I might share the spells here to offer up some humour. 

The PCs might be able to find Ngo-Gua's spellbook and thus acquire and these for their own nefarious purposes. 

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.2)

Created using HiDream I1 fast

In my last post I described how I created a tool that let me create a series of magical maladies, their cures, and adventure locations where the important ingredients to those cures would be found.

(I decided to skip the poisons in the end, because the material I already had was more than enough for what I needed.)

The next step was to put it all together! I envisioned a campaign where a few strangers to the Dommar valley would be stopping as their caravan waits for a rock-slide to be cleared from one of the passes through the mountains, and find themselves suddenly called to action to help on the basis that they are bored strangers, intelligent, and literate. The local witch, a she-gnome named Agatha is missing, and one of the villagers has come down with a perilous case of Frostbite Fever. They can't wait for Agatha any longer, so they beg the PCs to read Agatha's book and help them make the cure.

And this would be the core basis for the campaign. The PCs encounter some peril in the village that one of Agatha's cures or potions could resolve, and so the PCs find themselves replacing Agatha as the village herbalist, alchemist, and witch... at least until they can learn of her fate.

How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable

 When I was a kid, I taught myself to play Dungeons & Dragons from the Red Box. I have a lot of praise for the design of the Mentzer Basic set: It was the first version of Dungeons & Dragons with a really clear how-to play guide, as well as two introductory adventures played solo in a way that was pretty familiar to a Choose Your Own Adventure addict like me. Castle Mistemere was a pretty clever design as well, giving you the first floor of the dungeon, a map of the second, and mostly a question mark for the third, it eased the Dungeon Master into learning how to play their role; perhaps not as well as Keep on the Borderland, had but it gave you a more methodical approach. 

There was one way adventure with Aleena at the beginning of the book was deeply flawed, however. As a tutorial it was great, even as a piece of fiction it was pretty good. You got attached to Aleena, and then her death broke your heart, especially if you were 6 year old boy at the time...

...But, it also set up the idea that you were going to be playing the hero in a high fantasy narrative. You had an evil sorcerer, on the run, and, if you carried on with the PC you started with, were hunting them. You had a friend to avenge. Castle Mistemere reinforced that by suggesting that Bargle will be placed somewhere in the lower levels of the dungeon as a mastermind. 

This is great Dungeons & Dragons; don't get me wrong. But, unlike Keep in the Borderland, you don't start as a mercenary looking for a quick score. Nor do you start as an escaped prisoner, or a castaway. From the beginning, the introductory adventure and castle Mistemere create the kind of plot are that we now associate with the kind of ""trad" play that was soon thereafter refined by Tracy Hickman in Ravenloft and the Dragonlance saga. In other words, it was a heroic journey,  not a sandbox adventure,

All Hail the Kingslayer!!

Let me play the proud father for a moment and tell you the tale of Nargle the Kingslayer!

My oldest son has earned a ban on all screens except to practice coding in Scratch this week, so to keep him entertained in the mornings before school I decided to run a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics for him every morning, powered by a mix of Donjon and the Mythic Game Master Emulator. I am playing three PCs and he opted for only one. We agreed once the campaign was rolling that we would switch from me doing all the interpretation and game planning to sharing it.

We rolled them up using the Tatterdemalion's Heroes method at 1st level, and he got a character with a pretty solid 15 in Intelligence and Stamina, and a whopping 18 in Luck, but a low Agility. While I encouraged him to consider a Dwarf or a Halfling, My son, however, has only one class he ever plays: Wizard. And so was born Nargle, the Neutral rope-maker-turned-Wizard. Of course, it helped that that insane Luck bonus got added to all spell damage rolls based on his character's lucky sign.

Nargle has become one of the most destructive, world-wrecking lunatics I have ever had the pleasure to GM.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

My family holiday was full to brimming with gaming, and gaming-adjacent activities, and I hope yours was, too.

I took my children to Medieval Times to watch some falconry, jousting, and games of horsemanship. We had an amazing time The show this year was a lot more theatrical than the one I saw 15 years ago - it felt just a little too put on to me. But certainly good entertainment that inspired my son to run back to his Basic Fantasy RPG books.

We run a hybrid game quite often where we handle actual action dicelessly using Square Dungeon, but keep track of stats, XP, etc. using Basic Fantasy in order to help him learn the ropes of planning and running a good game. His last two sessions have done me proud, as they involved a lot more back-story, and let me solve my problems using wit, tactics, and negotiation rather than just being slug-fests.

Why Some Games Need to be Silly

 

I had a flash of insight last night after my oldest son had a bad night last night. My son, who sits somewhere on the autism spectrum, has a hard time regulating feelings. He has outbursts when confronted with negative emotions, especially when it comes to competition and losing.

In a bid to teach him sportsmanship,  and expose  to competing, winning, and losing until he has effective strategies to handle it, I have been playing Pokémon TCG Online with him a couple of matches per day.

It has been an uphill battle. Her number of reasons. Some of them are very relevant to understanding TTRPGs, and why some styles of play are more suited for particular types of people than others.

See, my son has been on a winning streak. My first round draw of cards in Pokémon TCG has been consistently abysmal.

Let's Build an RPG! (pt.3)

"Tom’s father begs Merlin the magician
to give his wife a child" 
by Leslie Brooke (1922)

 About a month ago, my youngest son asked to play an RPG with him like he sees me do with his brother.  My first inclination,  after years of gaming with my oldest, and trying Kid-oriented Fantasy RPGs such as Hero Kids, First Fable, and No Thank You,  Evil! was not to reach for a system at all, but to break out my diceless FKR-style system, Square Dungeon.  

Rules constrain and distract. They can become a sticking point for new and young players especially.  The whole point of a good TTRPG is to facilitate a game of narrative exploration and creative problem-solving. If you are too caught up on what The dice mechanics cover, and looking for the solution to all of your problems on the character sheet, your game is failing you.

The Best System is a Minimal System

Thus, the best game for a new player is the one that is not much more than a task resolution system and a fail state.

Rules otherwise serve mostly to enforce a consistent set of constraints to make play more complex and challenging,  and to help express the limitations and possibilities of the game world. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons,  for example create a world in which magic works a certain very simple way, in which combat has a certain level of peril, and resources have to be managed in specific ways. This makes the game both more challenging to play, and helps create a  certain kind of Fantasy world more effectively. 

Thus, when working with kids this young you can let the rules slide, and focus purely on the fundamentals of game-play. Then work your way up to D&D,. Then onward to other systems as the player advances and needs more challenges and variety.

Dragonette

 I will post a proper part 3 to my series about building a TTRPG on the fly. For now, however, I am happy to announce that a draft version of Dragonette is free to download on DriveThruRPG... after a few late nights of furious typing.

Get it Here and See an end result after it went from a Brainstorm to a 58-page TTRPG in a month.

Dragonette on DTRPG

Let's Build an RPG! Dragonette (WIP pt. 2b)

This is pt. 2b of my Dragonette project. I have bern talking a lot about making your own TTRPG lately, and when my son of 4 demanded that I run a game for him that used ALL THE DICE, I found a great opportunity to make something and share it.

Dragonette is designed with the following ideas in mind:

• It should not require math that deals with numbers over 20 (on the player side.)
• It should prime the player for learning D&D or OSR-based games.
• It should be easy to keep track of.
• It should be thematically appropriate for a 4 fear-old, but not mush or pap.
• It should still be interesting to the grown-up who is running and teaching it.
• It draws much of its inspiration from the works of Roald Dahl, Dav Pilkey, various kids' cartoons, and the more family-friendly Final Fantasy games. 
• It conscientiously avoids leveling up or steep power curves.

Obviously, I have the advantage here of being a rules guy: I like taking deep dives into the structure of TTRPGs, so I could quickly decide on rules based on those desired outcomes and mash them together, 

Dragonette fuses elements from Knave, Cairn, and Index Card RPG Core2e, all open culture game engines.

In part 1, I laid down a grounding of rules and style named on my objectives.  Honestly,  I could have done better and been more opaque  by splitting that into a Part 0 and Part 1. Part 2 is the process of making content for the game.

2A focused on Monsters, as they represent the kind of challenges the PCs can face in the game.  They set a lot of the tone. I made sure there were no humans, and a mix of helpful, dangerous,  and silly creatures  side-by-side.

Dragonette is a loot-based game: like Knave and ICRPG, your character’s capabilities are based on what they are carrying. This starting Loot and what zplayers can find will fo a lot of heavy lifting.

Here is what I have come up with. 

Let's Build an RPG! Dragonette (WIP, pt.2a)

Dragonette Mock-Up Cover
Art: "AI Generated Baby Dragon"
by Alana Jordan
(To be replaced when I unpack my art supplies)

 Obviously,  I have  not written out all of the needed rules for Dragonette in a clear fashion yet. I have left a lot to the assumption that my readers know how to play an OSR game, and are familiar with Cairn. In places, I have even referenced games that are either free, have a quick start, or have simple rules I have described in reviews. Assuming you can derive the rest, Dragonette is theoretically playable in this state... kind of.

Spelling it all out is step 3. First, we need some content to make it all work.

This is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to creating a game that is going to be perceived as "kid friendly" by the grown-ups considering downloading it as a gift for a kid in their life.

The mechanics, even if they are really well-designed for kids, won't attract players if the content doesn't match it. So I have to back up the engine I've cobbled together with a minimum number of spells, magic items, monsters, and treasures... and then make them work for your target audience.

Feycatchers BFRPG Setting (WIP)

Koffing & Weezing from Pokémon 
©️1997 Nintendo Entertainment 

 So, my oldest son caught a bad case of Pokémania this year. Pokémon cards, cartoons, dolls, and more are running rampant through my house and infecting his imagination.  I have been trying to dodge this phenomenon since he turned four. To no avail. It has been so intense that I am to the point where I have decided "If I can't beat 'em, I might as well join 'em."

But on my terms.

For Christmas,  among the Pokémon cards and Pikachu dolls, was a copy of Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, and a set of dice from me.

I decided to make this gift a little more attractive, by tying it in to his new obsession. I decided to build a campaign world that mixed Pokémon, Fantasy Role-Playing, and a bit of Celtic Mythology. Into a new campaign setting. 

The Mosquito of DOOM!

Let me tell you about the TPK I nearly experienced this week, because it was awesome.

I've been traveling, and that means there's been a lot of long drives with my kids in the backseat. There's only so long I'm willing to let them watch cartoons on the tablet, because I don't want them cranky or crazy at the end of the drive. So, I gave my son a refresher on Tiny Dungeon 2E, and taught him how to design a quick and dirty five room dungeon.

After hearing some of my stories, he has decided to add his own flavor of gonzo play into the game.

While driving to a family function last Thursday, I created a mighty, axe-wielding warrior-mage, who was sent to save the souls of the dead from a powerful ghoul who was eating both body and spirit alike in a nearby tomb. After defeating the skeletal minions of the ghoul, and avoiding a trap, I discovered a skeletal warrior who still retained some of his mind. I asked the warrior what the ghoul's weakness was. My son replied in a spooky voice: "fabulousness."

I decided to run with it, and had my magician use his magic to clean himself up, wax his moustache, shine his gear, and dye his clothes. I made an entrance in a cloud of sparkling magical smoke. The Ghoul was rendered powerless by my sudden intense style and charisma. As I applied a magical makeover to the creature, it screamed and melted away.

Thus, Haxxus the Bold became Haxxus the Stunning.

An Exercise in Saturday Morning Cartoon-Fuelled World-building

Magworld Comic Cover Mockup
Characters created by Owen & Brian Rideout
Character art created with Hero Forge
Used in accordance with their EULA

I like to feed my son's creative play with home-made toys and creations whenever I can. A favorite of his is "standies": paper minis based on characters he loves. I got the idea after I bought Hankerin Ferinale's Index Card RPG Core 2e and saw his paper mini template for TTRPGs. Over the years, a fresh-printed sheet of minis has been his preferred reward for a lot of accomplishments.  I have built sheets of minis based on Minecraft, the Octonoauts, Nintendo 's Kirby games, and Plants vs. Zombies. Grabbing a few images off of a wiki and plugging them into a template has given my kids hundreds of hours of play, 

Recently, he has started asking for designs that are a little harder to reproduce. Netflix's Action Pack was an incredibly difficult to make standies of, as there was very few screenshots online, no fan art, and nothing like a fan wiki. I ended up taking a lot of visually busy promotional images and spending ages cutting out the characters. 

When he asked for me to do the 2021 Netflix reboot of He-Man and he Masters of the Universe as standies, I took about a half an hour trying to sort a signal from the noise, and being reminded of that horrid Kevin Smith intestinal scrape "Revelation, before I surrendered and told him it can’t be done.

"He Man and the Masters of the Universe ", ©️2021 Netflix

"Aeronaut" character design by Owen Rideout
Art created with Hero Forge,
Used in accordance with their EULA

Rather than quitting,  I decided this would be a chance to turn a failure into an opportunity, and instead offered to help him design his own original characters, and a story for them.

I sat him in front of Hero Forge, a program he's loved to play with in the past, and told him that if he made up a few heroes,  I'd make up a few villains,  and then I'd turn them into paper minis for him.

I asked him if he wanted to do science fiction, fantasy, or maybe a science fantasy piece like He-Man to get him started. And before long he was working with me to make a character that he saw as the hero of his own imaginary cartoon.

The Flying Knight Class for S&W

 

Kain Highwind concept art
by Yoshitaka Amano

My focus on Final Fantasy this week comes from watching my 6y.o. son is discovering Final Fantasy IV for the first time. I am using it to help him work on math, reading, comprehension, and media awareness skills. 

Thirty years ago, the same game really made an impression on my 7th grade Dungeons & Dragons group.

One big way it shaped my 7th grade campaigns was through the characters my players wanted to play. FFIV inspired them to want to play heroic, noble characters, or penitent ones, characters who summon monsters, or ones who can turn any object into a weapon.

My best friend Matt asked if he could play a "Dragoon" warrior-acrobat like Kain Highwind with his signature leaping attack. I didn't see why he couldn't. 

Game Review: Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy Roleplay

Cover for Ryuutama, by Ayako Nagamori
©2013 Kotodama Heavy Industries

Author: Atsuhiro Okada

Translators: Matt Sanchez and Andy Kitowski.
Publisher: Kotodama Heavy Industries
Engine: Unique two polyhedral dice system
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG, Twenty Sided Store

Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy Role Play has an interesting reputation online. Whenever somebody asks if there's a role-playing game that is not built around combat and treasure hunting, it is one of the first ones that comes up. Is described on TV Tropes as a game that was built as a reaction to Dungeons & Dragons by someone who wanted to create a game with a less dark tone. 

I recently have had trouble getting my son to play RPGs, he has become averse to playing anything where he might lose. He's willing to GM them, and his stories range from the sublime to the bizarre, but are often combat-heavy to the point of being dull. So, I thought that this would be a great time for me to pick up this Japanese TTRPGs and give it a try, as I had a small budget for Christmas gifts for myself.

Simple Adventure Builder

Yesterday, my son foundered badly as a GM. He had no idea how to describe what was in a room, or come up with a role-playing based encounter other than the same wandering peddler character he has been using on and off for months.

To give him a hand, I built a series of random tables that can be used to build a cool five-room dungeon on the fly or with only a few minutes of prep. He intends to use it for Tiny Dungeon 2e, but it is completely system-neutral.

Want a quick and dirty set of dice tables for designing something short and sweet? Simple enough for a little kid to use? Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Simple Adventure Builder

So far, the best creations have been a model castle in a fish tank where a princess has hidden herself away to scheme against her father guarded by magic squid and illusions, and a dungeon where a witch is guarded by goblin servants which is lit by shining bugs and has an entrance to a sea cave with a shipwreck below.

#RPGaDay2021 4- Throne

My Son and I are playing Troika! Numinous Edition together. To tap into his current fascination (whales and squids) I built a scenario where his character becomes an agent of the King of All Sperm Whales. And I am hought I might flesh out that NPC Here for fun, and maybe inspiration.

Gaming with Kids: Final Thoughts

Playing TTRPGs even with small kids can be a great way to help them explore their world, and a great way to bond on a rainy afternoon. But it is going to be fraught at times with unique challenges that you aren't going to run into with mature players.

Running a game for children, especially small children can require a lot of extra work. You need to help them navigate the rules. You will need to contend with a short attention span in some way, either through the structure of your game or the volume of your content. You will need to be aware that if you are playing with your own children, or children that trust you that you are teaching values at the same time that you are playing, and make sure that your game reflects that, rather than trying to be gritty, morally ambiguous, or revolutionary.

As children are no good at advocating for themselves, you also have to exercise a significant deal more empathy. Reading the room, making sure that the kids at your table are comfortable and having a good time, balancing the game in a way that gives every player a chance to shine, and interviewing your players to figure out what they like and don't like is important. D&D tables with adults are subject to Market forces: if the players don't like the game you're running they won't come back. If you're running a game with kids, they may feel like they don't have a choice but to playay.

Most Children's role playing games has certain qualities that are designed to make them more approachable. They tend to use one die type, tend have very simple and light mechanics, tone down violent imagery significantly, and they tend to have some structural mechanism to help deal with short attention spans.

However, they also often suffer from being designed with very little respect for the intelligence of children, and, seem to have absorbed the values adjustment philosophy that took over schools back in the 80s. Namely, the idea that kids' media should have very little if any moral content or frightening material. They tend to be devoid of danger, the monsters are usually misunderstood, rather than being monstrous, and neither player characters or NPCs gets hurt.

Game Review : First Fable

First Fable Cover Art by Chris Bates
CC-ND-SA 2012 Play Attention Games 

Game Review : First Fable

Author: Matthew McFarland
Publisher: Play Attention Games and One Bookshelf, Inc. 
Engine: Custom d6 Pool
Marketplace: DrivethruRPG

I have had First Fable longer than I have had kids. It was in a bundle I purchased from DTRPG in 2012. It is a free, open-source TTRPG oriented to kids aged 8-12.

Player characters have three attributes: Strong, Fast, and Smart determined by character class (Knight, Pirate, Animal Keeper, and Faerie Princess.) They also select three "Shines", one "Slow" (weakness) and a special item or ability. All things are rated 1-5.

A challenge is set by the GM with an appropriate stat as the base pool, the Player's may choose to increase or reduce the pool based on character shines (with a rating) and slows.

Players may expend charges on their ability item (max 5) to boost the pool.

The players roll the final pool in d6. Each result of 4 or higher is a "Star." One star is a success, multiple stars improve the quality of the success. If all rolled dice a Stars the character adds a new shine.

In opposed rolls, like combat, both sides roll and the character with the highest number of Stars win. Ties are rolled over.

In combat, characters have a fight value equal to total stats and shines (12 for a new character). At the start of a fight, PCs choose how many stars an enemy may deal in damage (net stars from an opposed fighting roll) before they are out of the fight, to a maximum their fight value.  If a PC takes more damage than their highest stat, they are "hurt" gaining a penalty on all challenges and getting a new weakness temporarily.

In many ways this is a quintessential Kid's role-playing game:

• It includes classes based on what the author assumes kids would like, such as pirates and faerie princesses.
• It uses only d6s.
• The system is simple and relatively robust. 
• Combat has relatively light consequences.
• It uses a lot of unique, cutesy jargon.
• Focuses on pets or magic objects as a source of power. 
• Assumes the game will initially be played by kids and run by grown-ups. 

Playing TTRPGS with Children: Downsides

Image by Urh Kočar from Pixabay

When I decided on doing a series of articles about playing role-playing games with children, I felt it was important to look into some of the negatives.

Lots of people will write about this topic and not dare have a negative thing to say; and I find that strange. It is easy to see downsides to including kids in your hobby. Including behaviors you would never put up with in an adult player. I feel that it is important to cover some of the things that you need to watch for when playing games with kids.