One Shot: Lonnie Goes to Heaven, Down & Out in Dredgeburg

Cover to Down and Out in Dredgeburg,
by Skullfungus; ©2020 Skullfungus 

Tonight I am planning an adventure in Down and Out in Dredgeburg - a one shot done with relatively low prep. I am looking for scruffy Noir-feeling action with heavy influence from "The Goon". I thought I would share my thought process here. Tomorrow I will start the day with a follow-up before doing my article on playing Tiny Dungeon with my son.

In Media Res

The game starts with a running gunfight through a hazy, stinking night in the Dusk Market against the city guard. The PCs are surrounded and need to shoot their way out. Start with one of three red shirts in the cast, Harley, getting hus (horned) head blown off.

The PCs have to pick a clump of guards to rush. Myron, another red shirt suggests going left. Karl argues that going right will get them closer to the Greenblight. Going right will get Karl shot twice. 

After 1d4 rounds of shooting out, a marsh horror joins the fray to sped things up. Myron may insist on using a skull. Once enough guards are wounded, we flash back... 

Game Review: No Thank You, Evil

The Strange Banner Art
By Cathy Wilkins and Michael Startzma
©2016 Monte Cook Games 

Game Review: No Thank you, Evil

Author: Shanna Germain
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Marketplace: Monte Cook Games
Engine: Cypher System

No Thank You, Evil! is a kid-friendly game designed by Shanna Germain to introduce children to Fantasy Role-Playing. It is written  with a pretty young audience in mind, but runs on a simplified version of the Cypher System, which is also the engine driving The Strange and Numenéra, MCG's flagship games.

Genre, Role-playing, and Children

Image by Aruns 232 from Pixabay

I was fortune enough to take a class on the topic of Genre in Art back in 1999. You wouldn't know it from the discourse in culture, but at the time it was a relatively new field of study, and easier to pin down because pop-culture was still produced in a one-to-many, top-down fashion that is much easier to parse.

When you are gaming with kinds one of the great disconnects that is going to occur comes from their ability to understand and engage with the genre of a given game, even more than the medium of TTRPG itself. 

A Quick Background in Genre

Genre as we understand it is a product of the late 19th century. Writers had discovered, as novels were first being mass-produced and consumed that repeated use of certain themes and tropes could build a dedicated and predictable audience. The writer that focused on one type of character and story could more successful Than the generalist.

And the audience was usually much broader than those who were interested in consuming Literature as High Art and expected writers to experiment constantly. 

Art Defining Genre

Specialized magazines dedicated to particular kinds of audiences could get more eyes on stories. "Pulp" started as a term for the cheap magazines that sold specialized stories to working- and middle-class readers.

It is worth noting, however, that the idea of a genre as we understand it is a by-product have this process. Magazines like Weird Tales and Abraham Merritt's Fantasy would not have asked for a "Fantasy" or "Science Fiction" tale. And Robert E. Howard might have written for a magazine of Wild West stories, but he would not have set out to write a "Western"... Only to write a story that would have appealed to the audience of the magazine he was submitting to.

It wasn't until the 1950s that we started to clearly delineate categories of art, literature, and music beyond lit that was "Literature", "Pulp", and "Gothic" or music as being something more specific than "Classical". "Popular" and "Folk".  At first, this mostly served as a tool for marketing and crtitics:

Once everyone knew what "Science Fiction" was you could sell a movie as "Science Fiction" criticize it as compared to other "Science Fiction" and reach a "Science Fiction" audience.

Deathtrap Lite, Preview 1: The Devouring Wilds

"Coffin" by Vera Petruk; ©Vera Petruk,
Licensed through Shutterstock

As my regular readers might know, I have been working non-stop for two weeks now on my own TTRPG, which I am calling Deathtrap Lite. It started out with me trying to help my Low-Fantasy Gaming GM, Stephen Smith, revamp the alternative skill system he is using for our campaign... and I ended up writing something radically different out of it.

I have been trying to cram everything I like in both OSR and Minimalist rules systems into something a little different. It is crunchier than most modern minimalist games. At the same time, where it borrows from older OSR games, it streamlines, simplifies, and unifies everything that really worked about B/X and AD&D.

I would characterize it as light, but with more crunch than some of the indie OSR games I enjoy.

Where I am most proud of it, however, is in the places where I am making sure my own ideas are showing through, like the Wilderness Survival chapter, which has a system for managing overland travel that makes sure that no matter how tough your PCs are, trying to survive in the wilderness is potentially lethal.

I am so proud of this section, that I intend to make an advanced version of it as a sourcebook if this game is popular enough to warrant one.

So, to show you what I have been working on, I am setting down at least parts of eight chapters of my book so that you have enough to make a character, handle non-combat and non-magic tasks, and explore the wilderness using version 0.30 of the Deathtrap Lite engine. (I will confess: I am already making tweaks) You will probably find that it is not at all difficult to make it work with an OSR system. I wanted to make sure that before I shared it with you, I could give you something PLAYABLE.

You are, of course, missing out on Magic, combat, alchemy, madness, addiction, grisly wounds and healing, monsters, traps, and treasures... and three of the four PC classes here.

Grab it for free on DrivethruRPG

(I made it PWYW just in case you want to keep me caffeinated and get the game out faster.)

The Structure of the Role-playing Games

Image by Stux from Pixabay

As I have been building my own system, I find I've been thinking a lot about what goes into a role-playing game. This weekend has been exceptionally good time for helping me organize my thoughts. I was able to enjoy a one-shot game of Cha'alt run by Venger Satanis himself. I also spent Sunday night up late with some friends talking about game design as we are all at various stages of development in our TTRPGs.

And I wanted to point out an idea that I have mentioned in passing before, which is a notion of how a role-playing game is structured.

This is going to be a grounding for talking about kids' games. 

Bare Bones: Task Resolution System 

In essence all a role-playing game needs is a task-resolution engine. A roll, a card draw, or a coin flip (or drawing a Jenga brick, for that matter) to determine whether a character succeeds or fails when the outcome of their action is unclear: something to tell us where to go with the Narrative when we reach divergent paths and neither makes more logical sense.

Summer is Coming! (Gaming with Kids)

Hero Kids Warrior, Boy
by Justin Halliday
©2020 Hero Forge Games

I always work best on this blog when I have a plan in place that I have shared somewhere, so let me tell you about what I have planned for this month. This month and we'll talk about gaming with little kids.

Summer is coming, and most years for me that means road trips. Time spent at hotels trying to entertain my children. This year? It's up in the air. It depends on whether interprovincial travel is permitted at the end of June. It may be that we will be spending a lot of our summer days stuck at home trying to find a way to keep everything our sons have learned of the Year from leaking out of their heads in the heat.

And for my oldest, at least, that means role playing games. My son loves the creativity and Imagination of role playing games not a day goes by where he isn't asking to tell me a story, asking you to run him a story, or drawing a map in his Scribbler. 

At the same time, he is still a little too young to grasp of the more complex rules sets out there. Not that he hasn't tried. He enjoys playing BECMI Dungeons & Dragons quite a bit. His comfort zone his Tiny Dungeon 2e, which is light on rules and heavy on imagination. Like his dad, however, he is always game to learn a new system. And so over the last month we have been testing a number of kid oriented ttrpgs, which I will be reviewing over the course of the month. They are:

• Tiny Dungeon 2e
• Hero Kids
• First Fable
• Basic Dungeons & Dragons
• No Thank You, Evil!

And so I will be offering a review of each including a kids-eye view assessment of them.

And I have three articles planned on playing role playing games with kids, plus, if I can do so after completing Deathtrap Lite, I will put down the rules to the super-light TTRPG I created to entertain my son on walks to school.

It is my hope that by the end of the month, if you have kids to entertain this Summer, or are thinking of writing for them, I have provided you with some helpful insight. 

The Accidental Role-playing Game

Tentative inner cover page for
"Deathtrap Lite"; Art by Lady of Hats
CC-BY

Last weekend, I was chatting with Stephen Smith and the rest of the Thursday Night playtest team, and ended up discussing the task resolution system Stephen was using for Thieves in World of Weirth. After awhile, I realized that I had such a complicated idea for tweaks to his system that I needed to write it all down.

After a few hours work I returned to him not just with a tweaked skill system, I had written a whole new game engine, entirely by accident. Looking at the engine, I found myself saying things like:

"If I just use the roll this way, then I have a combat system... "

" If I make this tiny adjustment, I have a magic system..."

"If i use this tool I can keep the game simpler...""

If I turn my head and squint at an OSR stat-block, I can make this whole setup OSR Compatible..."

And I just started writing whenever my kids were keeping themselves entertained. When my little guy is napping, through Saturday Morning cartoons, and in the bathroom. And now I am just a couple of day's work away from putting out a game.