Redbeard's Ravings

This was prompted by this post on death .  Character's Last Will and Testament Rules Characters can have a will naming an out of game family member as a beneficiary of their wealth.  If the rest of the party fulfills that will, then the player's next character receives that wealth in starting experience. If dead character has an unfulfilled will and is not buried in a ceremony on consecrated ground, there is a chance that the character's spirit will rise as an undead spirit of level and abilities appropriate to the character and their death. I'm thinking about these rules in the context of a city/megadungeon campaign with a large player community.     There's always a question of what level to start a replacement character.  The common OSR answer has been to start at 1st level, while more recent styles of play replaced characters at the current level of the campaign.   It's also always a bit odd how party members fight over the be...

The world and the gaming community has lost another gem, one which might have been returning to us. Many others have posted wonderful recollections of his work, including this rare picture .   I've never seen that one before. Thank you. I feel forced to add what is in part conjecture.  If bringing up other topics into your gaming offends you, I won't apologize. I think this story shows how your different worlds are connected. Trampier seems to have died from cancer which was only discovered in his recovery from a stroke.  I can't say for sure, but according to this article , the vast majority of taxi drivers (Trampier's occupation) don't have health insurance. Two years ago I lost a cousin to cancer which had grown to an advanced and nigh-untreatable stage because he never got health exams because he did not have health insurance. I won't say that Trampier would still be with us if he had health insurance (he might have) or that health insurance and...

Have you ever made a dungeon and then ran it months or years later and not made any sense of your notes?   Not that you couldn’t read them, but you just didn’t have ANY CLUE as to what you were going on about. Once your memory goes, forget it. This happens to me more lately.   Not just because I’m getting to be an old fart, or that I design (and run) while a bit soused, but because I give my players free reign to go where they want.   They’ve found 6 separate entrances so far, each with many branches and their own character.   Often they’ll switch from one to the other for whatever reason; they don’t have enough clerics, another player has a map for an area, they heard a rumor, they have a goal in mind, etc, etc, etc. That’s by design.   But it does mean that I’ll make something, more than what they explore, and then they won’t come back to it for months or more.   Sometimes I’ll have warning, sometimes I won’t.   It makes DMing interes...

Elrad of  Back to the Dungeon asks 3 questions about what we like and dislike about "Old School Games" (tm).  Avoiding the question of "what is an old school game?" and including Castles and Crusades and Dungeon Crawl Classics to Hackmaster even, I thought this was good for discussion. Back in the day, each table had it's own house rules, the way that DM and group interpreted and molded the game to their campaign.  One of the cool things about the OSR (as opposed to most games of 4th and 3.x) is how we're returning to that. We have an embarrassment of riches of old school game systems.  One of the advantages of so many variations, covers if you will, riffed off of the D&D base is that we can pretty much mix and match, cut and paste, and agglutinate a set of rules from our prolific diversity. Here I've expanded some of my answers to Elrad's questions. So what are some of the features of different Old School Games and their clones that y...

Torchbearer is an incarnation of the Burning Wheel/Mouseguard rules designed for what is now understood to be the original dungeon crawl game: exploration and resource management. I've never played Burning Wheel or Mouseguard.  As I became aware of them, I was developing my taste for lighter rules and mechanicless narrative.  On the other hand, these are very thoughtful gamers.  The kinds of challenges that they present are at the core of Torchbearer game play are ones that I've been trying to present in my own games.  From an interview : The cramped caves, the oppressive dark, none of that came across the way it felt in an actual cavern. “I wanted to make a game where caving and dungeoneering felt like a big deal,” he says, “where your character could be cold and wet and feel the oppressive weight of the dark.” And: How much food and water will you pack? How many candles, torches, or flasks of oil will you stow in your pack? All of these bas...

"Specials" aka "Saturday Night Specials" are one of the fascinating set pieces of old school play, whether they're in a megadungeon or a location in a hex crawl.  By definition they are "unbalanced" and potentially either capricious or magnanimous. Sometimes they are adventure goals and occasionally they are obstacles.  Often they are the focus of megadungeon faction conflict , and they frequently are listed on your rumor tables.  They should be in some way enigmatic, unstandard but definitely memorable. One common old school standard recommends that 5% of megadungeon encounters be "specials", but I've been upping the percent in my recent level creations.  I like'm too much as a DM, even if I could be accused of being too cautious with them as a player (well, with some of my characters.) If you like these, pester me and I'll put up more of them. Statue of Prophetic Doom This statue of golden stone is of the goddess...

We've been recruiting for more players for our co-DMed old school sandbox.   We've used a variety of means: Pen and Paper games, Meetup, forums - and personals sites (really - a higher percentage of those folks actually reply and show up to game, go figure.) One of our new perspective players emailed the other DM to ask if his group (there's only one group) was "inclined to share our political views." Our current group includes a variety of people - women, poly people, queers, etc.  This is Seattle, so it's generally left of center too.  But we're not recruiting for an underground cell or anything - just people it would be fun to game with. Here's the background: I met two prospective players at my girlfriend's coffee shop this week.  We talked about the campaign and rolled up characters.  I did wear a hat with a small rainbow pin, but otherwise I had no overt badges, and no agenda besides the game.  95%+  of what we talked about was how we ...