The Silver Gull Campaign: Fiends in Mirrors

Zeelagur character portrait made w/ Stable Diffusion
and ethically sourced image libraries by her player.
©️2023 D. Westfal

 My players have finally closed a major chapter in the Silver Gull Swords & Wizardry Campaign over the last handful of sessions:

March 20th: Obliteration

Returning from the Fae with a rescued cleric in tow, the PCs all went to the cloning lab Reine discovered and beat the Echthroi flashcrafter there to a pulp, forcing him to tell them where to find the gear they left behind. And discovered that a replicant of Zee had been sent to take the 'Gull.

What's in Drakken? Designing Bespoke Games for Campaign

[Note: the game QuAD RPG has been changed to Drakken]

I am going to just share an article on my design rationale and choices for my new game Drakken RPG,.

Drakken came out of the fact that my wife and kids are dissatisfied with some of the quirks of BECMI Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Fantasy... especially the slow Thief Skill progression. When I ran my first session of the Drowned World Campaign, I got a bad reaction on how poorly those skills performed. I tried replacing them with the pips system from Lamentations of the Flame Princess to make it easier, but that still starts PCs with abysmally low success chances.

Nor did my Skullduggery Die improve things, The Paradigm of the low chance of success for Thieves was baked into the core of any OSR game that includes the thief. And ones that do not are rare.

So I sat and thought about their frustrations and asked myself "given that I want this to be high fantasy with a liberal dose of anime silliness, is D&D working as a system to give the PCs the stories my campaign brief expected?"

Well... no.

So how could I "fix" the game in a way that it gave the experience I was looking for?

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG might have worked for most of it... the skills for thieves are a little generous, and the warriors are a blast. Using their mechanics for my Drowned World PCs might have worked... but its magic system, and its lethality made it a dubious option.

What I wanted was:

• Simple
• Fast
• Low reliance on dice
• Accomodates a lot of non-standard classes
• PCs feel competent,  but not superheroic
• Magic that is powerful, but limited and dangerous.
• Different gods produce radically different clerical powers.
• Took as little possible time for administrivia and planning. 
• Compatible with my OSR material. 

It seemed like I might have to customize the game a fair way from vanilla D&D...

Time to Build a Custom System

On The Ethics of Product Reviews: Why People Reacted Badly to the Shadowdark Blitz

On Inertia

Shadowdark cover
©️2022 Arcane Library

I recently was having a discussion with my wife about my blog, and how frustrated I was that I hadn't had enough time to create more reviews lately. I have a wonderful backlog of classic RPG material and small publisher games I've been dying to get to. And, I am sure my regular readers have noticed that I have a terrible habit of deciding on a course of action, and then getting distracted by other projects.

I had stated my intent, for example to review Shadowdark back when it was an incomplete sample document a year and a half ago. Long before it's famous million dollar Kickstarter and the controversies around it. But when I was talking about my plans for the blog and my frustration with having missed an opportunity to have been ahead of the game on Shadowdark, had led to another interesting conversation about review ethics.

QuAD RPG: Classic Sword & Sorcery

[Note: the game QuAD RPG has been changed to Drakken]

So, I started a campaign in the Drowned World, using the classes as I shared them here, along with a custom magic system, and the LotFP Specialist Skills as an add-on to BECMI D&D. And my players were a little disappointed. They loved the world and the design, but the mechanics were not to their taste.

They didn't find the rules congruent with setting and experience that I had set out to create.

I asked for a couple of weeks and went back to the drawing board, looking for something simple and more heroic feeling. I started with Venger Satanis' Crimson Dragonslayer d20 for a test game, and then started hacking the hell out of it... adding stuff from DCC RPG, from Black Pudding Heavy Helping, from Knave, Maze Rats, ICRPG.. even Talisanta, until I had a cobbled-together OSR rule-set that would feel at home with the world I wanted to create.And was extremely rules-light. I named it Quick And Dirty RPG, or QuAD for short. Then I discovered that the name had been taken, and rebranded it as Drakken.

After a week of hacking, refining, and writing it all down I had something that was pretty playable, but to share it I would need to put together a Gazetteer of the Drowned World that could take a little more time... 

Thankfully I did have everything I needed to make an OSR clone here and now.

So I took a couple of extra days to polish it up, pull out the Drowned World material that was integral to it, and then added, as a bit of an experiment, some Ukiyo-e art from a favorite artist, and put it up on Itch.io to share.

I am pretty proud of this one, I must confess. It is fast, you only need a sheet of paper to track HP and inventory. I hope you will have a look and give me a little feedback.

A Drakken: Drowned World is now in the works.

Get Drakken: Classic Sword & Sorcery as a PWYW title on Itch.io here.

Year 3 (and a bit) in Review

 There years! I have been writing and creating through Welcome to the Deathtrap for over three years now, and I am very proud of what I have created.

And I am going to start this review by saying how much I appreciate my readers. You have kept me excited to sit down and write every single day.

Classy World Building (pt. 9)

 So whats left?

I have a few gaps left that I will ultimately want to fill to make the game feel complete:

• A culture of vivacious necromancers who appreciate life more than most because they know so much about death.

• A race of nomadic sailors.

• I need a heavily armored fighter type with a twist.

• Some kind of underwater people - I am thinking crabs that come in several different levels of human/crab hybrid, kind of like the Yuan-ti or the original Kahjit lore from the Elder Scrolls.

• A fire-themed group to round out my accidental elemental magician set.

• A psychic class; maybe a bird-like race of visionaries, with a spell list that is mostly divination with a few telekinetic abilities for good measure.

I feel that this would give me a good, rounded-feeling, but I do not need them immediately; I can afford to spread them out.

The Skullduggery Die

Ossuary Bone Dice Set CC-BY 2.0 Mindmax

This is an idea that was shared in the comments find my most frequent commenters and loyal reader McChuck and I decided to run with and do the number crunching for.

The credit is therefore not mine but my mission is to share the awesome.