Adventure: Into the Wizard's Hookah

Map for "Into the Wizard's Hookah"
made with Dungeon Scrawl and GIMP
with images from Pixabay

I have had some wonderful interactions on twitter with Guilherme Gontijo, the mind behind Lantern's Faun games. He is an absolutely brilliant designer, focused on pamphlet and statement-sized role-playing game books. He is also behind the gorgeous layout of Pacts & Blades.

While I was perusing his work I came across this absolute jewel of a resource he created: "How to Make Cool TTRPG Pamphlets", which made the process of creating 5-Room Dungeons in pamphlet format look fun and easy. So I decided to try it out,

I created a psychedelic funhouse dungeon entitled Into the Wizard's Hookah which is available for download. 

I took a lot of inspiration from the song "Mycelia" by Glitter Wizard.

Mini Adventure: The Face of the Temptress

I have written a short OSR adventure free for download entitled The Face of the Temptress. You can get it here.

Including one new monster, one new spell, and one new magic item, The Face of the Temptress explores the ideas of curses, possession, manipulation, and temptation in a new way. It is designed to occur as a series of short events and encounters around other adventures, creating a character-centred sub-plot in your campaign.

Below is the introduction and Overview for the adventure:

Game Review: Pacts and Blades

Game Review: Pacts and Blades

Author: Lucas Rolim

Publisher: Self-published

Marketplace: itch.io

Engine: Custom 2d6 roll-over

Pacts and Blades: Moorcockian Fantasy is a simple, straightforward game system created by Lucas Rolim to offer fast, cinematic combat and magic systems.

Pacts & Blades makes no bones about what it is: it overtly states that it leaves skills, initiative, economics, tactical movement, etc. to the GM to handle. It is only interested in handling action. The resolution mechanic is robust enough to use for most dangerous situations, especially with a few hacks, but it offers little guidance.

I tested Pacts & Blades as a solo play system using an automatically generated dungeon through Donjon. I found that it moved pretty quickly, and was up to handling a dungeon crawl adventure with minimal conversion work or improvisation.

In play, the GM sets a difficulty rating between 1 (almost a guaranteed success) and 5 (impossible). A resolutuon table sets a range of numbers for failure, qualified success, and total success. There are eleven collumns on the table: one for each difficulty, and a number of intermediate collumns in between. Character training and narrative advantages can shift your roll to easier collumns on the table, giving a higher chance of success. On a roll of Total Success, if the character has specialized advancements for the roll, they roll on an additional "feat" table for special effects and advantages, like higher damage, extra attacks, or an extra use of a spell.

I would suggest that Pacts & Blades works best as a hack to plug into other OSR games. It can easily take over combat and magic while the GM handles movement, travel, encounter design, etc. using a Dungeons and Dragons retroclone. It might be best thought as an alternative rules system, rather than a standalone role-playing game.

If we treat it as a set of alternate game systems, the question becomes does Pacts & Blades offer something new and interesting to play?

One Page Dungeon! Gastropodia: A Morel Dilemma

I made a one page dungeon for the the 2020 One Page Dungeon Contest.

I call it Gastropodia: A Morel Dilemma. It is about tiny mushroom people who are not evil, but they are real jerks when it comes to treating other cultures' dead respectfully. They ride around in a mostly-dead giant snail, and don't make themselves too much of a nuisance... until they get stuck.

Here it is in .BMP

Or you can get in in glorious 150dpi .PDF format here.

The setting of Gastropodia is one I have a ton of ideas for. I have notes on at least 8 adventures based around this snail dungeon and its environs. Most centering around the idea of adventurers being shrunk to 1" tall. I have no idea how many people would be interested in such a thing, but if I hear enough interest, I might stat out this adventure for OSR gaming, or write and compend multiple one page dungeons together around it.

Developer Interviews: Venger Satanis

Wicked Mentations of the Crimson Ink-Stained Warlock

(An Interview with Venger Satanis)

This is the first in what I hope will be a long series of Q&A jams with notable (or notorious) people in the Indie and OSR game communities about their work, ideas, and inspirations. I intend to write carefully researched, thought-provoking questions with each developer so tgey can give us their most complex, boldest takes on Gaming, Fantasy, and the future of our hobby. Not to mention a chance to plug their creations.

The anwers are unedited, their ideas are their own. Hopefully each one will find a way to blow your mind. This is going to be a wild ride.

Venger Satanis

W2tDT: Venger As'Nas Satanis is the author of some of the wildest, weirdest, and occasionally most controversial material for the OSR. From his weird horror-fantasy hex crawl Islands of the Purple Putrescence, to his long-running exploitation Sci-Fi inspired Alpha Blue, his work is strange, subversive, and experimental. His latest book, Cha'alt is a gonzo science fantasy story that includes everything from space amazons to Lovecraftian horrors to high-stakes alien game shows. He is also a co-host of the podcast Inappropriate Characters alongside Kasimir Urbanski and Jobe Bittman (and previously, James Desborough), and writes the blog Venger's Old Time Gaming Blog. Thanks for letting me pick your brains, Venger!

VAS: Happy to do it. I think being asked interesting, probing, and possibly awkward questions gets us to open up and think about our process a little more. That's always a good thing, if occasionally uncomfortable. The sleeper must awaken! 

Let's start with the obvious questions: How long have you been playing RPGs? How did you start? When did you decide to take it that big step beyond being a DM to being a developer?

I was gifted the magenta box of Basic D&D way back in 1984 or thereabouts when I was about 9 or 10. Didn't come naturally, but eventually I figured out what was going on and played D&D with friends, their older brothers, cousins, babysitters, etc.

As soon as I started DMing, I injected my own original material into the game. Periodically, I would create my own games based on familiar properties, like G.I. Joe and Transformers. Just me writing a couple pages out with pencil on loose-leaf paper. It wasn't until around 2012 that I discovered the Old School Renaissance and really wanted to write a proper dungeon module that was clear enough for others to run. That first adventure was Liberation of the Demon Slayer. 

Resource Spotlight: Donjon

Example of random dungeon map
generated by the scripts in Donjon

Donjon is a collection of Perl-based CGI scripts and LAMP apps created by the developer "Drow" and were originally hosted on his website Demonweb.

These scripts offer a wide range of random generation tools for TTRPGs. Some of which offer incredible complexity.

Random Dungeon Generator

My favourite of these is the random dungeon generator. There are variations for generic fantasy, AD&D, d20 Fantasy, Microlite 20, Pathfinder, and the 4th and 5th editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

You set a name (although a randomly generated one is provided), set the level and size of the party, and choose a motif, which flavours the environment and types of encounters. You can also change the style of the map: determining the size of the map, number of entrances, general layout, etc.

The end result is a map, along with a by-room description of the rooms and corridors, with traps, mysterious effects, evocative detsils, notes on entrances, etc. Even better, the msp is hyperlinked so that clicking on a room automatically takes you to its description in the text below.

Tools for learning new RPG systems

"Game" by Katrina_5 from Pixabay

While surfing my Twitter feed today I ran across a post by a user called @artplebe. They were experiencing a lot of stress and frustration because they were having trouble learning new role playing systems. They felt that if they can't learn a new system, they likely won't have the confidence or the understanding to create a podcast on RPGs.

They also worried that if they couldn't learn new rules that it might make them a bad DM, and then it may be an indication that they aren't ready to create content for role-playing games.

In another life I was a life coach. I helped men build new careers, get out in the dating scene, and get healthier. It was a great career, and had it not been for a series of tragedies in my life, I would still be doing it today. As it is, I still cannot stand to see another person struggling and feeling so frustrated without wanting to help them out.

So, with that in mind, I want to offer some pointers on learning new role playing game systems that might be helpful to @artplebe, and pretty much anyone else who is struggling to learn a new role playing game.