Weird West, or Some Hoot-Hollerin' Hijinks for Weird North

Mood Music

Far from the titanium citadels of the Necrothanes, the unblinking gaze of the Blood Moor obelisks, and the shadow of the dinomancer-ridden Dank Tower, a tumbleweed ambles like an aimless toddler across sun-choked plains of brittle soil. The world has changed so many times, shedding its skin like a desert rattler. What is old is new, what is new is old, and nothing is saved from the long finger of the weird. 

Falls of the Colorado Chiquito

Weird North is a setting. It is a cracked world. An old world. A new world. A place somewhere in the acid fantasy dreams of Jack Vance's cat who had to put up with years of listening to the author prattle on just so. Weird North is a cheater's setting, to be entirely honest. It makes sense in consistent meta terms, at least as far as shared history or global effects and parameters are concerned, but it is still a cheat. A cheat, because frankly neither I nor my players really care that everything must make perfect sense. Perhaps some call this gonzo, perhaps some call this amateur. Perhaps, well, perhaps I don't have much vested interest in what most folks think about my mental gymnastics. The Post/Post/Post Apocalyptic genre is a toolkit and sandbox fit for the kings of recess playgrounds and Saturday morning cartoons. It is, at least, useful for my daydreams.

Faction Procedures + Dolmenwood Example

Sandboxes tend to imply factions, but faction play is sometimes a boogeyman for open world games. Should it be subtle, just a thought? Should it be a tracked rubric of needs and wants, like a private rumor table with bonuses? Should it be a complex system of rolls and resources, like a solitaire Matrix game the referee plays behind the screen on off-hours? Well, it ought to be something if merely to add some variability to whatever sociopolitical forces prop up the flavor of the setting. 

d66 Star Wars Background Loadouts Adapted from Edge of the Empire

Like I did for Cairn via Old School Essentials, I've adapted here thirty-six backgrounds selected from the greater Edge of the Empire RPG for use in general Star Wars games (specifically, for my purposes, Galaxy Far Away). If using the latter, follow character creation as normal, including random starting items, but also roll d66 (or choose) to determine a background with a unique beginning loadout. The background is a narrative "career" of sorts and should inform gameplay, but its not a shackle and obviously you can go and pew pew (or not) to your choosing. There are no mechanics or modifiers or any such thing tied to the items listed here. It's all keywords and interpretation. Flavor, yo.

Obi-Wan gets it.

RPGs with Kids, 6: Prepare for RAMMING SPEED

The game: Any Planet Is Earth

The players: Ted, my kid son (playing Miles, two-term expedtionary). Brian, my older brother (playing Chet Lancaster, three-term expeditionary, two-term mercantile). Nate, my kid nephew (playing Blaze, five-term military). 

The situation: Dornami Station, at the edge of a long trade lane, is evacuating due to a sudden solar shift in the system's star, dooming everyone on board with an imminent supernova.

The complication: The player's are dead-broke and want to hijack the expensive med supplies in the storage complex but are being forced to leave by the private security firm running the station.

The scheme: Leverage guile, lateral thinking, and a bit of gumption to score and leave without a bust (or a blast, ahem).

Ben Nicholas - Artstation

Ponderings on Any Planet Is Earth v2

At the time of writing this, I've sold just over 400 copies of Any Planet Is Earth (with about 4,800 downloads). That's small beans, to be sure, in the world of publishing, even in the indie/niche corner of the RPG hobby, but I only ever wanted to release it because it's what I want to run. That said, I am warmed by it's name popping up from time to time on reviews or threads or discussions, and getting messages from strangers and close peers alike who like it a lot and have riffed about with it on their own time. That's neat.

I've had a "second edition" in mind for a while now since it's original release back in June of 2020. My original timeline was a release earlier this year before the arrival of Spring 2021, but then I had another kid and bought a house. There goes 6+ months of so-called free time. C'est la vie.

Jeff Woodman

Twenty Quick Settings/Games for Immediate Use

 About three weeks ago, I posed a simple design challenge to the scene writ large:

1. Pick a genre, setting, or time period 
2. Write one or two paragraphs on context 
3. Produce one page of random tables 
4. Give advice on tropes and how to use them

Using these guidelines, I surmised that one could create a fully-actionable setting for use at the table, and with the advice and assumptions baked in, little to no abstracted rules would be necessary to actually conduct play. The setting begets the way things work. You agree in good faith to navigate the world as it suggests it can be navigated. Instant sandbox, minimal work. 

Well, I was greeted with TWENTY full responses to this challenge, so without further adieu, enjoy! 

How I Run and Play an Ultralight Game

I take it for granted that I know how I run and have been running my games for a few years now according to the "free kriegsspiel/FKR" (henceforth "ultralight") approach. For almost a calendar year since this concept has become increasingly vogue across the interwebs, many earnest folks have raised repeat questions not about "what is this?" but "how does it actually work?" At the risk of being overly ironic, think of this post as an introductory rulebook to a style of play that assumes a rulebook is patently unnecessary. I'm going to make this quick, because that's something I especially appreciate about this method: it's fast, it's intuitive, and it only needs a little nudge to get going. 

Disclaimer: This is how I run my games. This is not "how it always works." It is a (hopefully clarifying) example. The approach here is a varied spectrum. Two referees adopting similar styles may yet produce very different tables. This is, of course, how any two different people running any two different games will pan out, but it's worth stating here since there is not, in fact, "one way" to adopt this method. There are various preferences, emphases, and relationships to consider. So, to reiterate, here is how I go about it.

Play Worlds, Not Rules: Design Challenge

I find that I love the free kriegsspiel model not because it is simple (though that is a large plus) but because it all is about intuition and honesty with subject matter. In general, storygames and mainstream modern RPGs and even a swath of the old school community don't appeal to me because portions of the experience are deliberately gamified when they could just be role-played. I've said elsewhere that an adventure game needs little more than interesting choices regarding interesting people amidst interesting locales. 

You've met a person, right? How do you talk to them? Now talk to a person inside of a game in the same way. Context, motivation, and the assumptions of the setting guide your actions and approach, not mechanization. I appreciate arguments made that certain rules and precedures help to emulate genre or setting, but my counter is that those methods are redundant, as even with passing communal knowledge of the setting at the table, everyone can reasonably play anything with imagination and conversation. Rules can be helpful as a framework, but they are not necessary for play. All you need is a world in which to act.

My challenge for you all is thus: 

1. Pick a genre, setting, or time period 
2. Write one or two paragraphs on context 
3. Produce one page of random tables 
4. Give advice on tropes and how to use them

This is how I put together Galaxy Far Away. Humor me: anyone with even a tangential exposure to pop culture has either seen or knows the gist of Star Wars: A New Hope. Close your eyes and imagine the tropes. 

There is an evil human empire with smart uniforms and bureaucracy. Stormtroopers are ubiquitous but only effective in numbers. Common people are either disinterested outliers minding their own business or enterprising vagabonds looking to be a big fish in a small pond. Organized crime is everywhere. Almost everything is janked together, rusting, or smeared with dirt. There is space magic, but it's mostly a philosophical matter and the vast majority of folks have no exposure to it or its lightsaber-wielding practitioners. There are thousands of sentient species, but they all commingle. 500 credits will buy you a cheap blaster. 

I followed that with random tables for gear, intrigue, rumors, contraband, complications, and rivals. The dice and mechanics are effectively invisible, with the destiny/force token bit little more than a meta ruling. How to play: go do things--let the tropes be your guide.

...

But instead of Star Wars, you could pick Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin, or My Neighbor Totoro by Hiyao Miyazaki, or A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man by James Joyce, or Final Fantasy 6, or the concept of 18th century fur trapping in Canada, or the brief context of pre-isolationist China adjacent to Zheng He, or [insert Saturday morning cartoon], or [insert that one brochure you read one time in a doctor's office], or [insert early hydraulic society's first steps]... you get the idea.

So, bloggers and referees and players and tinkerers, give the above formula a shot and let me know about it. Let's call it at three pages tops.

VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS - Pulp Adventure in the Style of Indiana Jones & The Rocketeer

Mood Music (Look, I can't help myself. I love mood music.)

In October of 2020, the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) Discord released the first edition of its APA-style zine, The Neverending Drachenschwanz, with the theme being "Zeppelins & War." The iconic and ominous zeppelin conjures images of dieselpunk esoteria, disaster, and 100% nefarious villains piloting them to enact schemes of global manipulation. 

Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair, from The Rocketeer

As such, I took it upon myself to leverage Norbert Matausch's excellent Landshut and go full-camp into the tropes of moustache-twirling, scheme-hatching, globe-trotting villains flying around in sinister zeppelins while you, the players, race to thwart their plans and unravel their public prestige. 

You might be a journalist, armed with little more than a bowie knife and a tome of ancient lore. You're great at brawling, but you're bad at driving. Regardless, it's up to you and your friends to stop the plot of Kitanova Vadimovna, the dread cultist from the USSR whose signature explosions bristle from her heavily-armed sky fortress. Can you work with your contact, Barnaby St. John the fixer, to recover the ebon monkey of Ibn Fatullah before Vadimovna and her goons get to it first? Will you be able to evade the meddling of Illuminati mercenaries pursuing their own ends, but intervening in yours?

The above is a full plot generated across sixteen short d6 tables. A few rolls is all you need to whip up the seed for a complete adventure, a party of "good guys," the villain, their zeppelin, the artifact, and more. The game is run primarily by description, impact, and common sense consequences, with opposed 2d6 to adjudicate situations with unclear outcomes.

Michael Byrne as Ernst Vogel, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Grab your whips, your flashbulb cameras, and your side-car motorcycles. Indulge your spirit of daring and dauntless adventure and rise to the occasion. Pit yourself against the evil caprice of cabals, conspiracies, and grandstanding public enemies while VILLAINS FLY ZEPPELINS!

 Grab the simple two-page spread PDF here.

Android Setting: Jinteki

Mood Music 

"Never forget that your clone is a living being. Like pets and even humans, clones have biological necessities that must be addressed. New owners can at times forget, and clones--especially ones placed into new circumstances--are often reluctant to bring them up..."

In 1873, Satoshi Akiko stepped out of the fuedal holdovers of rural Japan and into the modern world of pharmacy. Kyoto was on the up and up, and the Satoshi family made a name for themselves by cutting ahead of the curve regarding industrial distribution for their wares, and riding into the 20th century on the wave of progressive company policy, cross-media investment, and private outsourcing of medical research. The pharma boom of the 21st century rocketed the Satoshi name into household presence, though their milieu was limited mostly to the staples of combating common illness, improving skin health, and adding shine to the pearly whites of the world's suburban sprawl.

Everything changed when the Big War came and went.

d66 Cairn Background Loadouts Adapted from Old School Essentials

As I mentioned before, I forever admire the B/X & OSE feel regarding traditional Dungeons & Dragons adventuring, but I'm partial to Into the Odd's take on classless characters. The consequent reliance on items, background, flavor, and cunning to formulate your "class" identity in-game (and several factors therein allowing for constant malleability and foreground growth) is the sweet spot for me in terms of who a character is and what they do. This comes full circle with Yochai Gal's adaptation of the Into the Odd family for "traditional" adventuring in dark wood and dungeon alike, Cairn.

Stepan Alekseev

So, without further adieu, I present to you my interpretation of nearly all extant Old School Essentials classes (including Classic Fantasy, Advanced Fantasy, and selections from Carcass Crawler and Dolmenwood) in Cairn loadout style.

(Also available in free PDF at DriveThruRPG and itch.io)

My Approach to NPCs

I'm not a good player. Or rather, I am not an invested player. I've learned that I find it hard to remain invested in piloting a single character, and ended up vastly preferring the referee's role over the years due in no small part to my enjoyment of playing through a myriad of non-player characters. Making the mundane come alive, and sprucing up the set dressing of the game world--that's the stuff. It's the world-building I enjoy most of all, but not through arduous campaign planning... it's through the needs, desires, and machinations of NPCs and their related random tables.

After coming across Joel Haver's short films about a year or so ago, I've enjoyed them greatly, and recently, he's put out several animated bits that resonate with my approach to NPCs a great deal. Let's watch them and see what we can gather.