The end of the year is always a good opportunity to look over the year’s posts—RPG posts, to be exact. The year itself started on a sad note: Fight On! is going down. The writing was already on the wall in 2012 and the adventure I had submitted for the last issue is available as a free PDF, Caverns of Slime.
But on to positive things! I tried to list the Old School Fanzines I knew, hoping to find a magazine “for me”. It’s weird. What about Fight On! Magazine made me want to contribute? What I remember best are the early levels of The Dismal Depths and the Fomalhaut material by Gabor Lux.
classic D&D character generator
Next session we will be assaulting the Barrowmaze using a party generated by drawing from a pile of random first level characters generated by this character generator. Electronic vat men!
To be honest, however, I haven’t been using it. My Sea of the Five Winds campaigns already has a map, my Pendragon game uses the maps from the book, DM Florian uses Hexographer, DM Harald uses the maps from the book.
That reminds me. Last spring I ran the One Page Dungeon Contest 2013 and all the posts are tagged 1PDC. I’m currently not planning to run the contest in 2014. Do you know anybody who would like to do it? I wrote How To Run A Contest to help you get started.
I also discontinued the Old School RPG Planet. If you’re willing to do the actual leg work of asking people to submit their sites, talking to bloggers, answering questions, I could set it up again. I am willing to handle the technical aspects of it. I just don’t want to deal with angry dudes on the Internet.
But on to more positive things again!
a strict reading of the magic system
In my campaign this means that all the elves of a particular elf settlement will have a subset of the spells available to the elf lord. What I do is this: I write down the elf lord’s spell book using the notation above and whenever we meet a minion of a particular level, it’s easy to figure out which spells they have available by looking at the second column.
In a similar vein, I wrote about using 1d20 instead of 2d6 for dungeon stocking. As it turns out, however, I do this so rarely that I keep forgetting about it. I just don’t run enough dungeon adventures.
using 1d20 instead of 2d6 for dungeon stocking
Still in the same vein, I was also comparing old school dungeon stocking to other methods of adventure location creation and found the traditional way of doing things to be very quick and the result just as good as the new ways. I’m a gaming traditionalist at heart, I guess.
comparing old school dungeon stocking to other methods of adventure location creation
I thought about using skills inspired by Apocalypse World in my games but ended up not doing it. DM Harald does it in his campaign, but I remain sceptical.
using skills inspired by Apocalypse World
my session preparation process for old school games
how to run settlements in sandbox campaigns
how to let players introduce facts
In addition to that, I quoted a Google+ comment by Ian Borchardt on wilderness encounters and a comment by Kevin Crawford on urban campaigns.
☯
And with that, here’s to the blogs, conversations with strangers on the Internet, and freedom, justice and peace for us all.
freedom, justice and peace for us all
#RPG #Retrospective
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Suffice to say I’m not using skills based on Apocalypse World per se, but based on reaction rolls plus a modicum of GM arbitration. It *looks* somewhat like AW, but I don’t feel like I need a system as rigid.
– Harald 2013-12-29 15:30 UTC