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.

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.1)

Stardew Valley is © Concerned Ape Games

My wife has been playing Stardew Valley a lot this summer; a game where you play a young person who has just inherited a farm in a fantastical world that sits at something like 1980s technology. It's what the video game industry, and more recently the TTRPG industry refer to as a "Cozy Game." Meaning it is focused on a small area, the stakes for success are failure are small: you might save a community, but the world is in no danger, and the relationships you build with the characters in the community is very much the focus.

Cozy games are not my cup of tea at all, but the game has sort of cast a spell over the rest of my family. My boys are excited to hear what has gone on in the farm and see the strange new fantasy farm animals and the useful item that my wife's avatar brings up from the dungeon. 

Well, if you want to run a good scenario the key is to figure out what your audience likes, and I got the feeling that something like Stardew Valley might make an appealing draw for a few weeks as we ease back into the school year.

So I sat down and asked myself "How can I make this interesting for me, so that I can get myself into the game enough to make it interesting to them?" 

 As I sat and pondered, my mind drifted to a concept that I have been spending a lot of time considering lately: the idea of prep as play.

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

My Holiday in Outer Space: Cepheus Engine and Mongoose Traveller

Is is January 12 already?!

2025 has been absolutely crazy for me, readers! And not necessarily in a good way. I haven't had much time for hobbies since my Christmastime Dead in Space solo game. But I have had some new things land in my lap and on my hard drive over the Holidays.

Cairn 2e arrived on my doorstep as a late gift last week, and it looks amazing! I am trying to steal some time for a solo game to sink my teeth into it so that I can give you all a fair review. I was also able to replace my ruined copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia with the generosity of everyone who picked up Strange Ways last month.

But the more interesting thing that landed in my lap was synchronicitous.

Spending My Holidays in Outer Space

This Christmas I wanted to travel to outer space, so I brought my hard copy of Death in Space along. Death in Space is awesome, and I played a lot this holiday, but I wanted a bit of variety... 

For years I have had wanted to give Traveller a try as well. Originally written by Marc Miller for the impring Game Designer's Workshop in 1977. It was one of the first role-playing games, and was designed to be able to handle a wide range of different kinds of Science Fiction. It's fans have supported the game with such devotion that it has been in publication pretty much constantly since 1977 in some form or another, and the game remains backwards compatible with products released in the 70s today.

It's biggest influence was the book Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (the second of a trilogy), and a lot of elements, including how hyperspace works in traveller, the Sword Worlds faction, and elements of the history of its original setting, The Third Imperium of Man are lifted straight out of Space Viking.

Interestingly, a lot of pop sci-fi makes reference to Space Viking, but if you missed it (which is easy to do) you wouldn't catch them. For example, Space Viking includes a planet called Hoth and a starship called the Rozinante, which are borrowed respectively by Star Wars and The Expanse.

You can read the book on Project Gutenberg if you are curious. I did as part of my hoiday in space, and I don't think you'd be sorry.

I also made sure that Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition, was on my tablet so that I could finally give myself a taste of Classic Traveller.

If you missed it in my Old-School Science Fiction Roundup, Cepheus Engine is a thrid-party retroclone of Marc Miller's original Traveller RPG, with a few minor quality-of-life tweaks. It was created a few years ago in order to have an open-source version of the game during a lull in its production by its current IP-holder Mongoose Games.

My wife took an interest in Cepheus Engine when I described its life-path character generation Although she didn't enjoy it in practice it led to us both taking a deep dive into the history and various versions of the game.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw that Bundle of Holding had a Traveller Bundle featuring a stack of manuals including both the 2024 update of the core rulebook, and the light-weight Traveller: Explorer Edition.

Strange Ways is the Deal if the Day on DTRPG

 Strange Ways: Six Classes and Alternate Magical Systems for Any OSR Adventure Game is my Copper Bestseller set of alternative magic systems and classes that use them for OSR games. I'm very proud of my creation!

Revised Pact Magic for OSR games.

First off, let me say that spinal headaches suck. I have been out of commission for two weeks with the mother of all migraines after getting a lumbar puncture. 3.2/10. Would not recommend. 

Second, a big thanks to Johnny Price for alerting me to some link rot that has occurred on my early articles. My old version of my Pact Magic system for Ær is gone, and so I wanted to share a newer version.

A World-Building Experiment: Heroes & Homelands (pt. 2)

 So, now that I have a mechanical framework, let me share with you what I have so far in terms of the campaign design.

(Unless you are someone invited into this campaign, in which case, there are going to be spoilers of a sort.)

I will be using the campaign planning techniques I described in the article Game System Hacking 101.

The Vision Statement

I want to provide PCs with a setting that is a journey into places of wonder and weirdness. The further they journey the more ethereal, strange, and magical the setting becomes; a movement from the Mundane to pure psychocosm.

The setting will have dark moments, but overall be more focused on the strange and inexplicable. Monsters are not there to torment, enslave and devour, so much as they are just so alien that their natures and human understanding just don't fit well together. The PCs will be rewarded for pushing farther from a place of stable reality ("The Homelands") and into a farther realm.

I intend to take a lot of inspiration from The Ultraviolet Grasslands and Black City.

I also intend to use existing modules and materials such as my collection of DCC modules and the Hill Cantons collection when I need quick material.

Here's my Poster Pitch:

Heroes of the Mistlands

A Mystical and Psychedelic Saga Through a World Warped by Magic for Heroes & Homelands.

200 years ago the Great Assembly, an academy of magicians in the East of the continent of Eraskas were on the cusp of bringing Man into a new golden age. Their experiments in magic had held back a terrible plague, and cleared the Eastern Marches of many of the monsters that lurked in the hinterlands. And then some grand experiment went wrong. All of the lowlands of Eraskas were covered in swirling, brightly colored mists that brought with them strange phenomena, fey creatures, and warped everything it touched. Only a few Northern kingdoms, protected by the Raski Mountian range and the Great Shelf were spared. They are called the Homelands. They have survived in an uneasy peace, ruled over by an emerging group of Plutocrats who work hard to control every aspect of life in the Homelands.

You are a villager of Tollun, a small silver-mining town on cliffs that overlook the mists. With the vein exhausted and trouble on the roads, the town is starting to become desperate for new ways to support itself. The temptation of plunder form the ruined cities of the mists is strong. And somewhere far off on the Eastern Horizon, a voice is calling those blessed with the ears to hear...

Inspired By

Movies: The Winds of Change, Oblivion, Jack the Giant Killer, Stardust, Mirrormask, Fantastic Planet

Video Games: Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy IX, Elden Ring, Divinity: Original Sin II, Starbound, Majesty

Music: Vol IV - Black Sabbath, Solar Hits - Glitter Wizard, Le Roi est Mort, Vive le Roi - Enigma

For this game, I will be customizing Heroes & Homelands.

Books: Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance, The Hand of Oberon by Roger Zelazny, Magic's Price by Mercedes Lackey, A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony, Stealing Magic by Tanya Huff, The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

Other Role-Playing Games: Numenera, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City, The Hill Cantons, Overlight, Cha'alt

Next Steps

So this tells me a few things that I want both in the world and in the mechanics.

In the World

• A home base where the PCs feel pressed to risk the mists, either for the well-being of the community or for a higher cause.
• A place that feels familiar and Earthly (or perhaps middle-earthly) as a starting place, but that allows rapid travel into an otherworldly place.
• NPCs who care about the PCs and show them support, and who are suffering from hard times.
• A world where magic was once wondrous and made a better world, but is now constrained out of fear.
• Mysterious lands where the old and familiar has been transformed into something new. 
• Regions where the magic takes on different character.
• A stifling element to the culture that might encourage misfits to leave: an oppressive old money-driven Plutocracy, combined with a failing, power-grasping aristocracy, and a cultural climate with a touch of Janteloven might be just right.
• (I suspect an early-modern Nordic theme might be just right.)
• I don't want to make the religion oppressive: the characters will want a strong moral guiding light and a sense that there is something worth protecting and rebuilding. But perhaps a culture that abuses the religion might work.
• A divine being or place to encourage PCs to begin a pilgrimage at some point.
• Leads on lost arcane power that might make life easier in the Homelands that requires deeper journeys into the Other.
• A small fragment of a once-larger pantheon, so that PCs might discover lost ways that make their homeland make more sense.
• Some hints of the lost wonders. 
• Some lost Kingdoms the PCs will know something about from History that were destroyed by the Mists.
  

In the Mechanics

• A system for PCs and things to be warped by the magic of the mist.
• Tables for encounters and wonders that are coded by themed regions, like "illusory", "dark", "sensual", "wild", "primordial", "mechanical" and "holy." (I might be able to draw some ideas by revisiting my old Magic: The Gathering decks.) 
• Tables for encounters that get more strange and dangerous the farther from the "Homelands" the players go.
• Tables for discoveries to become more powerful and wondrous as the PCs head Outwards.
• The Homelands can have familiar fantasy races like Dwarves and Halflings, but once out into the wilds, I want new creatures... perhaps a people transformed to match their theme in each region.
• A pantheon based on an existing one, but fragmented and reduced in its scope.
• A custom class based on survival in a world where the knowledge of a standard ranger will be initially troubled. And a custom class based on dealing with the Mists. 
• I may consider removing druids and switching rangers to AD&D style Divine / Arcane casters.
• Barbarians don't fit for a starting homelands character, nor does it fit the more fantastical theme. This is a place for Kugel the Clever moreso than Conan the Cimmerian
• Dual-class rules that let wanderers change (dual-class?) to custom classes based on survival in a magical world.
• Abstracted supply mechanics to help facilitate long journeys. I might hack some further material out of Deathtrap Lite for it.
• For the sake of familiarity, a world that feels more Early Modern that Medieval. So muskets, renaissance-era muskets. Perhaps a higher base AC for PCs so that they can be more flexible in combat without. (All stuff that can be pillaged from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.)

In the next article, I will create a version 0.1 of the new RPG based on these notes.

Thematically, after thinking about people living in high, rugged mountains, mention of Janteloven, and Plutocracy, I think I will use elements of Swiss and Danish culture as a template for creating my setting. 

Summer of Game Development

 Summer has come and gone. And like many others, I'd hoped I create more content than I did. Especially here on Welcome to the Deathtrap,

Over the Summer I ran a campaign set on Hot Springs Island that I specifically structured for more casual play. I framed every game session as a foray onto the island from a neighbouring colony. If players didn't get off the island in time, the boat would leave without them.

I used dynamic rumour tables to give them several some things they could choose to do except would only necessitate one or two city encounters or possibly a small five room dungeon. As it was the summer and many of my players are parents, it was quite hard to wrangle enough people and a few sessions ended up being nothing more than a cat between them myself and one or two players.

Overall it was fun and my players came out of it with a few excellent stories, which I consider the mark of a game well dungeon mastered.

Pitching New Games

Now that the summer is over, I don't particularly care too continue with Hot Springs Island, however. I've had an itch to do some World building and some rules hacking. And, as it stands, life is a little hectic for some of my players and have not been able to show up for many of my Silver Gull campaign sessions. Creating a game with that same ability to just drop in and out is critical if I want to keep playing games with players aged 34 to 60 on weeknights.

So, I prepared for game pitches in the last week of my Summer travels that would both meet my desire to try and create something new, and continue to enable players to drop in and out, while taking advantage of the fact that they will be available a little more often than they are over the summer.

The pitches were as follows:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil played in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, eventually fused with the giant saga, and the underdark saga, possibly going all the way down to the demonweb pots.

• A Norse themed campaign running in Low Fantasy Gaming where the player characters would play new arrivals to a colony at the edge of the world we are humans work with the easier to drive the frost Giants from midgard.

• "Undeadwood," A pulpy Weird West game where the characters find themselves in an extra planer realm parallel to Texas where creatures from American folklore like hodags and jackalopes and thunderbirds are real, the hungry dead walk the desert at night, and the Devil himself will gamble for souls.

• And finally, a two-fisted post Noir set on a 1950s science fiction Space Station. Essentially a fusion of Babylon 5 and LA confidential. With a twist of 70s SciFi Sleaze, which I tentatively called "Two-Fisted Tales of Omikron Station"
  

For those last two prompts I decided that system would be to be determined. Whenever I was going to settle on, I would need some heavy customization to make it work the way I want it to.

Jumping the Raygun

I got excited enough about that last prompt that I put some serious thought into it and started creating a game for it using the Drakken engine, with liberal borrowing from Star Adventurer and Alpha Blue.

I was, after 4 or 5 days of tinkering in my free time to the point where everything that needed to be overhauled for Drakken had been, and I'm to the point where I'm adding new content and tables to make a complete game. 

I figured that it was the most likely pick for my players, and even if it wasn't, it's a setting I will pitch again in the future, and something that my readers might enjoy playing.

Hold on There a Minute, Pardner...

Of course, they surprised me and went for my Undeadwood pitch. Quite frankly, the only game I have that even remotely if it's a weird West setting in my collection is Cowpunchers by the Basic Expert. 

Now, I suppose I could have tacked hey magic system is a monsters onto Cowpunchers and done just fine. It's a cool system that I bought ages ago and haven't had a chance to play. But, I wanted something just a little bit lighter on the rules, because I play in a very limited time window, and want to keep the burden of character generation down to an absolute minimum.

And so I have started writing not one but two games and already made significant progress on both.

I will be posting a lot of thoughts about the development process as I go, as it has really got me thinking about Word-Building in particular.

The Adventure Game Part of D&D Directs the Faction-Driven Wargame Part

I want to amplify a topic recently posted in Bradford C. Walker's substack  entitled Clubhouse Row (Part One: A Proper D&D Club):

The dungeon delving is the side show to the real game, which is the contention between factions vying for dominance over the land. It is a wargame first and an adventure game second.

Specifically, it is a faction-based wargame where Player-vs-Player conflict is core to the game. AD&D1e handles this without needing supplements. The actions of the factions shape the setting, and smaller adventuring bands can take advantage of the liminal spaces between them (literal and metaphorical alike) to seek out their own objectives (often as not found in a dungeon somewhere). [ibid.]

I'm not sure I see D&D as a wargame first, but I definitely see that the adventure game is informing a very different wargame going on behind the DM's screen: One of the most interesting ways in which Dungeons & Dragons retains its war game structure is in the way factions are played especially in old school games. 

A well set-up community has several different factions vying for control and influence over the community. This can be the villains, but it can also be various peaceful groups within the town. 

Tailoring a Campaign: My Player Resource for Running Hot Springs Island

I am in the process of setting up for my Summer game of Hot Springs Island. One of the first things I wanted to do aside from sending out the pitch document that I shared with you last week, was to write a guide for the players. This guide had to tackle some basic tasks:

1. Cover how to make a character
2. Reiterate at least some of the house rules in the pitch document.
3. Expand on the information in the pitch for players who have bought in.
4. Add in any new content relevant to the players.

So I started by reiterating my character generation process. I added in firearm rules cribbed from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and a gear list that brings the characters into the 17th century, including some era-appropriate armour and equipment.

Making Best Use of Downtime

Many of my players don't like downtime. They want a fast-paced adventure where they know danger is around every corner. They prefer the kind of pacing that you see in modern Dungeons & Dragons play. Downtime for them is like a montage. And for many years, because I know my audience, that was how I played. Downtime only existed between acts or when the PCs decided to- and the unfolding events allowed them to- take a break.

The Evolution of Timekeeping Advice in D&D

As a kid, I missed reading the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, I missed out on its advice for keeping time and running the game (I went from playing with the Mentzer "red box" Basic Dungeons & Dragons to using Mentzer Dungeon Master's Rulebook and the AD&D Player's Handbook, to using AD&D2nd edition. Thus, I missed the best resource ever written on running a D&D campaign. The AD&D2e Dungeon Master's Guide buried its advice a somewhat in favour of optional rules and setting design, and skipped some of the best options. Bu the time they decided to expand it in DMGR1: The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide, the developers at TSR had very much moved away from Gygax. Here is the meat of their description of how to manage pacing of a campaign in DMGR1:

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,

Scrap: Remind me Why I'm Doing This Again?!

 Two articles ago, I mentioned my project Scrap. I have been itching to create a campaign set in a dreary Sci-Fi crapsack world where space colonists sent through wormholes in the 1980s have been cut off from Earth and met a series of disasters that have forced them to abandon all but a few of their colonies and break into six dystopian factions. PCs are young people who have never known Earth, and are now serving their faction by plundering old planetary outposts for food, water, air, and technology in hopes of holding on long enough to rebuild.

The major inspirations being Duskers, Lethal Company, We Fix Space Junk, Kakos Industries, and Dining in the Void. 

In Search of the Best Crapsack Future

 

So I have had two (video-) gaming obsessions and three podcast obsessions that have managed to collide in a perfect storm of inspiration

And that has had me grinding away like mad at my google docs for about a week now.

Deathtrap Lite: the Keep on the Borderlands Principle

When I set out to build Deathtrap Lite, one of the core ideas I had in designing the game was that I wanted it to be compatible with most TSR-era D&D modules and OSR adventures on the market, while still being mechanically distinct.

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.

How I Used One-to-One Time in the Silver Gull Campaign.

Time Magician's Academy
Generated with Unstable Diffusion

One-to-One time is making the rounds again on Twitter, so I decided that it was time I gave a concrete example of how it worked for me in my Silver Gull Campaign. 

You can see reports about and articles inspired by my campaign here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.

Silver Gull is part of my Xen: Weird Fantasy setting, and I played it with a mix of Swords & Wizardry and Deathtrap Lite. (and supplemented with AD&D1e) Xen is a world with an eight-day week and a fairly elaborate calendar you can read about in my setting document. This document also contains a summary of two months of downtime activity.

My rule was that, barring my own ill health, every week of real time was eight days of time in Xen. So, after each Monday night session, my players had seven days of downtime before the next session. I would advance the date in Xen seven days after the last date that passed in the session.

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.

Storycraft vs. Chaos: Why I Minimized Prep Time

 For about 34 of my 38 years of playing Dungeons & Dragons and similar games, I have not been a fan of random tables. I was very much in the Hickman school of gaming when I was a kid, I believed that GM should be crafting a dense narrative structure, and then adjusting it whenever the players did something I didn't expect.

The idea of buying a whole book full of random tables would not have appealed to a younger me. Even well into my 30s, I was far more interested in crafting bespoke encounters and adventures that reinforced a central narrative or collection of narratives. I tried not to waste much energy on things that felt random and unconnected to the story I was crafting.

My planning method worked like this:

SciFi Storygame Roundup

Table Top Role-Playing games are used in several different hobbies; different communities prefer different game types to get different results. One of the types of games that I wish I could get more into, but that just doesn't mesh with my social group very well are Storygames.

While old-school TTRPG players are looking for a VR experience using the imagination and narration as an interface, Storygames are interested in creating an emotionally satisfying story at the end of the day that met the expectations of the players going in based on the conventions of the genre and pre-game expectations they set up. To facilitate this, the game rules are often set up very differently from a more traditionally-designed TTRPG.

Because the goal of Storygames are very different, they are often designed to make world-building more collaborative. they tend to take agency away from the GM, and have mechanics allowing the players to take control of the narrative and make Metagame adjustments.

I like Storygames just fine: I think many of them are clever and innovative in ways an more traditional TTRPG cannot be. But, as my players are not interested in the experience, I have had less reason to collect or learn them. Which in turn means that I haven't got much cause to write about or review them here, but as I went through an extensive list of both classic and OSR SciFi games, I think it is interesting to share these games to offer some comparison and contrast.